SoulSe

Forgot about SATA devices :roll:

I wass posting at the same time as scoopy :P Just to add to what he said: sda and sdb refer to devices on seperate buses. So sda1 and sda6 may be different devices on the same bus or different partitions on the same device.

The sd devices refer to external drives connected to either usb or firewire ports on your computer (or even serial / parallel ports if you have old zip drives or whatever). The easiest way to find out which is which, is to mount them. Mandriva might have automatically have mounted them already. I haven't used it for a while though, so I can't tell you if that's true. But if it has, you can run: $ fstab To see where it has mounted them to and then browse those directories (or check the icons on your desktop) to see which is which. If they aren't mounted, post and we'll help you make it so. As for formatting, in Linux we usually do things a little differently. First, we partition using fdisk - but for mass storage devices this usually isn't necessary / possible. So all that remains is to make a filesystem on the device, this will also wipe out everything on it. I like reiserfs, so I would use the mkreiserfs command, but vfat is the best file system for removable devices. Formatting isn't necessary though, just delete the files inside with a rm -rvf. ;)

AFAIK - Google Earth can be set to render in either the DirectX or OpenGL API - so obviously for Linux we would switch it to OpenGL, -but- should you choose to use Cedega (www.transgaming.com), you'd probably have better results in installation and in utilising either API. Wine is cool, but when it comes to beefy rendering, such as what is going on here, Cedega usually wins ;)

It would probably be easiest to reinstall the game and lay on the most recent patch. With 4 patches in a row, something must have gone south. It's a pain to reinstall, but all your saves and settings will be preserved (ut stores them in your home dir).

w00t

As aioshin said, it all depends on what kind of server you want / what you need it do. Just to elaborate though: If you're using a large LAN you might just need a router, firewall and DHCP server. This will handle the assigning of IP addresses on the LAN, route Internet access and provide security. It's also really simple to setup. I usually direct new users to webmin to achieve this. Webmin is installable in Mandriva via urpmi. It might be useful to set up some form of SAMBA server as well, if you have Windows boxes on the LAN. You can even enable Apple Talk support for Macs. For more advanced serving, such as mail, web, ftp, etc. - it can all be done with Mandriva. So, all we need to know is: what do you need? :)

I messed around with Linux a little when I was 16/17 with Slackware... but only started using it seriously around the age of 21. First distros.... Redhat 6, Mandrake 8.2.... and *cough* Corel Linux, which I bought out of the bargain bin at a software store.

I'm somewhere between Junior and Senior... so I voted Senior :P Been using Linux for 5 years, and got rid of my last Windows partition 4 years ago. It's weird though, you usually only know the things you've had to do to your own / friends computers very well, so while there are some "senior" things I can do, there are other things that complete n00bs may be able to do that I can't.

Just to reiterate what Ix said: - Run the xorg configurator first (and not again). - Then install the nvidia drivers. - Then change your xorg.conf file so that your device driver is "nvidia" Running Xorg config will wipe out your config file and run the generic driver, which you don't want.

Open source has had far more people working on these project for much longer. It's too little too late from MS if you ask me, clusters run Linux and no one else can keep up with the open source development model, especially not when the headstart is this huge. Of course, open source is easily nicked...

What I said should relate to any manufacturer, I was just using Dell as an example. I would start by contacting the manufacturer of the laptop and ask them if it can be upgraded and also get them to do it, especially if you are still under warranty. Third part fiddling might void it.

Almost any WYSIWIG html editor would be better than Frontpage - it produces horrible code. There are several open source alternatives that would produce far better results - even Mozilla composer would be better. As for whether to use extensions or ftp - my above suggestion should cover that - no Frontpage means no need for extensions. If you are going the frontpage route and don't have any choice, then I'd still say FTP - it's a simple way of handling things and the less you have of Frontpage in your site, the better.

There should be a few that can have their cpu upgraded. Dell, for example, will roll out a series with a variety of CPUs, but using the same MoBo, so upgrading the CPU on most of them would be possible. The problem with updgrading any hardware on a laptop is not whether the laptop will support it, but how many screws you'll have to remove to get the job done ;)

If your kids are after Windows games, checkout www.transgaming.com for Cedega and Point2Play (which makes installing easy). As for installing native Linux games - some have their own installers that must be downloaded and the rest are installed like any other application in Linux - urpmi being the best means in Mandriva.

Try updating all of your urpmi sources with Easy Urpmi and then try again. WINE will be there.

3 years for me using just Linux. Dual booted for just over a year before that. The only other OS I use is OSX on my mac.

BSD is generally considered to be safer out-of-the-box than Linux. It has systems like ipfw (which Linux's iptables is based on AFAIK) and other neat security tricks. Some also argue that a sudo approach is safer than the general su approach, etc... At the end of the day though, Linux and BSD are both just as safe as you make them. I wouldn't consider one to be superior, but as I said, BSD is said to be generally safer out-of-the-box. *shrug*

As papaschtroumpf said, we have had numerous threads about this before. You can play any game you want in Linux using Cedega (see www.transgaming.com) or choose from AI's list of native games ;)

You certainly can. You could setup a mail server on your box and have it automatically download your mail from the gmail pop servers and spool it locally on your machine. Alternatively you could cron something like mutt to download it for you. Mutt could also store it on the local spool where you could use any client (mutt included) to read it. I would go the mutt route, purely because I've never worked with a mail server before.

There are dedicated WPs for scrip writing, my brother had one a while ago... but no open source ones that I know of. My writing was for magazines, so it was usually pretty simple and my requirements were basic taxt formatting, spell checking and highlighting. Thankfully we did not use change-tracking at that company, otherwise it would have been Word and Word. No compromise. In my current job (still writing) I use MS Word on my iBook. I have NeoOffice (Open Office native port) running as well, but I use the new MS Word Notebook feature to record interviews with notes quite often and we use track changes sometimes from clients, which Open Office can't do. At least we have no Windows in our entire company, it's all Macs and Linux boxes - and since we do all the writing for the Go Open Source Campaign, we have to use Open Office when dealing with them.

A lot of the open source software available with Linux is available for Windows too. I have used all of the following in Windows (at one stage I had no choice but to use the OS at work): - Abiword - Gaim - Open Office - Xchat - Firefox - Thunderbird The list goes on... so no, you can't run Mandriva _in_ Windows, they are both operating systems and, as such, you will have to work in only one at a time (lets not go into VMware here), but you can run most of the programs included with it. Perhaps you meant dual-boot? This is where you install both Mandriva and Windows on the same machine and can boot into either. If this is what you were asking, then yes, you can.

I don't know what you do for a living, but I write. The only tool I use in my job everyday is my Wordprocessor. I used Abiword exclusively for one year working at a large publishing company on one of their titles without a problem.

Or emerge openoffice. Go to bed. Wake up. Use Open Office. I still prefer Abiword though *shrug*

I agree with what tyme said. What I don't get though is why they think it's necessary to have proprietary elements in their distro. It is possible that they had no choice in that they were using purchased code, but I doubt. I don't mind proprietary code where it is necessary (although imagine how much better graphics in Linux would be if nVidia and ATI made their drivers OSS), but I can't think of any valid justification for it to exist in MEPIS.