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I just had an ISP failure that lasted several days, and just as Murphy would have it, I needed to consult some old email in my gmail account, which I couldn't do without online access. I would like to figure out a way to backup my gmail mail to my linux machine in a way that I would easily consult it offline if needed. gmail has pop3 and smtp access (free for now) so it seems to be the way to go. I'm sure I could run KMail and have it act as a pop3 client, however I don't want to have kmail running all the time, I still want online access to be my primary (and almost only) way to read my email. Ideally I would like to figure a way to run something nightly in a cron job to back things up (without deleting mails from the Gmail server), with the ability to open that backup mailbox in KMail if I need offline access. Can I do that?

Thanks John. It turns out between the time I had the problem and the time I saw your post, I rebooted the machine (upgraded the hardrive) and the mouse works right again. The machine had been up for quite a while, and the firefox window itself had to have been up for weeks (I use it so otfen it's always on one of my virtual desktop)

try renaming the .dat to .avi, that should be all you need to do.

Actually, my experience with Cooker is that it's much more unstable than the Debian "unstable" repositories.

This started happening a few days ago I think: when I'm in Firefox, I can scroll the page up and down using the scroll wheel, but some (all?) of the time, when I scroll up, I end up on the previous page, as if I had hit the backspace. This is really annoying and makes the scroll wheel almost unuseable in firefox. Any idea what's causing this? EDIT: If I go in the Mandrake Center and use the mouse applet, the visual feedback applet ("test your mouse") shows every button properly except that some of the time it shows both an up and down arrow when I scroll the mouse up.

Is the archive password protected? I think you will observe that behavior and Ark looks like it's decompressing but it then fails silently.

I copied my existing drive to a new larget drive, so now there is free space at the end. Is there a way to resize the partitions without loosing the data? I know I can do that on my windows machine using Partition Magic, but I don't know of a linux equivalent. [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

I'll second that. Most games are cross platform too and have demos for all the platforms supported by the game itself.

Give SimplyMepis a try, so far it's the best "out of the box" experience I have ever had under linux. browsing flash/java and windows media sites in firefox worked out of the box. To play DVDs you do have to install the magic decryption library though (for legal reasons). It's debian based so it's easy to find and install software through kpackage or synaptic. Hardware support has proven to be outstanding (including ndiswrapper wireless card and lucent winmodem working out of the box!) It's KDE centric however (fine by me), so if you're a Gnomie, you gotta look somewhere else. The nice thing is that since it's a liveCD, you can get a pretty good feel for whether you like it or not without commiting to it, then simply install to harddrive if you decide it works for you.

I've just installed SimplyMepis on an old-ish laptop (Celeron 650 192M RAM) and while it's on the slow side, it worked very well from the start. Automatically detected my Motorola wireless card and automatically set up ndiswrapper for it, etc... I am quite impressed with it. It's Debian based so software install is synaptic based, but the added "Mepis Touch" makes it easier to use. I had never heard of Beatrix before, does it have the following features out of the box? I personnally think that a newbie friendly distro needs those because they can be tricky to deal with for newbies: -diswrapper and most common wireless drivers (for example broadcom) - wpa_supplicant to set connect to a wireless network secured by WPA - java integrated with the browser - flash player integrated with the browser - media player compatible with windows media integrated with the browser (e.g. mplayer + firefox plugin) - media player compatible with quicktime media integrated with the browser (e.g. mplayer + firefox plugin) - media player compatible with real-audio media integrated with the browser (e.g. mplayer + firefox plugin) - can play audio CDs - can play DVDs (even encrypted ones) These are things that can quickly turn a newbie friendly distro into a nightmare. The DVD issue has legal implications and it may not be too hard to install the requried library through synaptic or whatever, but still a puzzling step for newbies. Playing media, especially embedded in web pages , especially windows formaat, is not that easy to get right (just look at these forums) yet it may make your web-brwosing experience sub-optimal. I know at leat 2 people that gave up on linux because they couldn't get wireless networking to work. Don't blame it on them. FYI, as a comparison, SimplyMepis doesn't allow you to play encrypted DVDs out of the box and setting wireless with WPA involved installing wpa_supplicant and configuring it by creating files under vim. Not exactly newbie friendly either, but at least the browser things worked right out of the box.

What can be done under linux to make it boot faster? I'm running linux w/ KDE on a laptop (at this time I'm running Mepis, but that's not really relevant), so the old argument of "you don't need to reboot often so who cares?" is moot. I have some ideas of my own but I'm not sure how to implement them: - how do you stop looking for new hardware (it's a laptop, it's unlikely to change)? - how do you tell X to use a specific resolution at start rather than "scan" and determine every time which resolution appears to be the right one to use. - can some services be started after the computer has booted? for example does the NTP daemon have to start at boot or could it start later? (wireless using ndiswrapper/wpa_supplicant doesn't seem to be operational at the time NTP tries to start so it times out and fails). - other ideas?

partially answering some of my questions: there seems to be a set of linux tools for the toshiba laptop to manage the Fn+number hot keys: http://www.buzzard.me.uk/toshiba/index.html Does running a different windows manager (like iceWM) under Mandriva make sense?

I have an old Toshiba Satellite 2805-S201 laptop currently running windows XP. It takes forever to boot on XP and runs really slow making it a pain to use. In addition I want to re-use the XP license for another box. The hardware is relatively linux friendly (for example I there are report of being able to use the lucent modem even though it's a winmodem) but it's old and not too powerfull. # Intel Celeron 650 MHz # 192MB PC100 RAM # Built-in 3.5" Floppy Disk Drive # 6GB Hard Disk Drive 4200 rpm # 8X DVD ROM # 13.3" TFT Active-Matrix Display # S3 Savage/IX M7 Graphics Controller with 8MB SDRAM with TV out # Yamaha YMF754B-R sound chip # Integrated V.90 56K Xircom (Intel) modem (Lucent chipset) # Integrated 10/100 Ethernet LAN (Intel Ethernet Pro 100) # USB 1 # PCMCIA The laptop would be mostly used for web browsing and playing media, and will be used also by my wife who is a windows only user, so the GUI needs to be friendly to a previous windows user. I also want to be able to use it for VoIP calling and instant messaging (skype and Gaim will do). The requirements seem to fit well a "desktop" distro like Mandriva and KDE but I'm afraid it's going to be dog slow on the old hardware. The 4200 rpm harddrive is not conducive to fast boot times, which is really something I'd like to get. Some of the exposures here are: - the HD is too small to do a dual boot as an experiment, so I'd like to get it "right" the first time. - I would really like to retain the TV out functionnality so I can play media to my TV: under windows you press the the Fn and 5 keys simultaneously to switch between the integrated LCD and the TV out. Does that mean that it's handled in the BIOS or am I going to loose it in linux? - I currently run a motorola WG825 wireless card running WPA with AES encryption. I'm getting conflicting reports as whether ndiswrappers works with that card, and I have not yet seen any instructions on how to set up WPA and AES encryption in linux. Any comments or distro suggestions would be welcome.

You're right, the H.M. Fakk copy is linux specific. Haven't played it in a long time anyway...

I messed up in voting, I forgot Heavy Metal Fakk, so I have 4 games: - Heavy Metal Fakk - Unreal Tournament - Unreal Tournament 2004 - DOOM 3 I will admit that I didn;t buy any of those specifically for Linux, I bought them to play on Windows and occasionally play them on linux What I do play on linux are a few free games, like NeverBall, Chromium, ... I used to play some MAME games under linux but I now have a dedicated MAME cabinet (which run under winodws because I play other games than MAME ones on the cabinet and they don;t run in linux)... I mostly game under windows though. I used to run a dedicated UT2004 server under linux and sometimes run a teamspeak server.

Does anyone have a suggestion for a network packet analysis tool like ethereal but that might be a little more lightweight? I'm looking for something I could include in a USB-based "liveCD". TCPDUMP doesn't show the full packet and I would like something that is gui (gtk?) based.

so I could run a more "lightweight" WM like icewm and still be able to run the same apps as usual, like K3b, etc...? cool!

OK, I've been using Linux for quite a few years now but I have always used either Gnome or KDE (mostly KDE) so I never really thought about what Windows managers really were or did. KDE and Gnome seem to be mostly a look and feel thing since apps from one usually run fine in the other. I have been playing with a knoppix CD and even though it boots in KDE by default you can choose other WMs, like fluxbox and icewm. Are they also just a look and feel thing or is there more to using those "light" WMs? for example will some applications not run unless you're using KDE?for example would K3b stop working because it's a KDE app? I noticed that the "start" menu under icewm has way less apps in it than the KDE menu does, but it is just because they're not in the menu or becasue they won't run? for example I couldn't find Kate in the menu but Kate seemed to run fine when invoked from the command line.

I use the VNC server built in KDE (aka "remote desktop" aka krfb) sometimes as I type along on e of the key ands up repeated a number of time. so I'll "hello world" and end up seeing "helllllllllllllllllllo wooooooooooooooorld" it only happens some of the time, so I'm guessing it has to do with the quality of the broadband link. Any idea of how to fix it? I *never* experience this problem when use the windows remote desktop to control my windows machine, so it has to be something in the vnc server setup or just in the rfb protocol itself that makes it not very solid.

I know Mandriva Move has USB key support for putting your /home directory on a USB key, but is it possible to put the distro itself on the key and boot from it? It's easier to carry a USB key than a usb key + a cd-rom. Otherwise, what distros are designed to be booted off a usb key? Puppy Linux is the most promising I have seen, but I don't mind using something "heavier", my USB key has a 1G capacity after all. I like the full functionnality offered by full blown live-CDs

That's why I won't buy Dell: their custom BIOS and stuff just gets in the way.

According to this link, support should already be provided: http://www.matroska.org/technical/guides/playback/linux/ did you try to open the file with xine or mplayer?

GF4 are the older generation. Of course NVidia really muddle the waters with the GeForce4 naming: a GF4 MX is really a form of GF2 and was a budget card even when it was brand new. The Ti ("Titanium") series was the top of the line about 2 years ago and still holds its own quite well for most current games, although under Windows it doesn't suport some of the features of DirectX 9 and may not play some of the brand new games that require some of DirectX 9 features like v1.4 pixel shaders. ((Battle Field 2 comes to mind). The "FX" series of NVidia cards was the first to support shaders 1.4

I used the one that is part of the KDE applications, I think it's just called KChm (not at that machine right now). Works great. was available as a mandrake rpm.

NVIDIA GeForce2 Ultra 64M. Since my linux machine is on all the time, making it silent is one of the priorities. I refitted the card above (bought used for $20) with a large quieter fan (I think it could run purely passive cooling but it did come with a fan originally). The only game I haven't been able to play comfortaby under linux with that card is DOOM3. UT2004 looks great and play smooth at 1024x768 (albeit at lower detail level than my windows machine). Next time I buy a video card for my main gaming rig (which runs windows), I'll do the "graphic card shuffle" with my other comps and the linux rig will end up with a totally passively cooled GeForce4 Ti4800 which is currently being used in my MAME cabinet.