As a longtime Mandriva user, I too hope the Mageia distrowatch climb is sustainable.
Like you I have learned so much from the many great people here with the MUB. I am sad to see the decline in board activity.
As m10 said, you can use alien to convert between .deb files and .rpm files. As scarecrow said it is not advised. Do a google search to find more details on the linux package (program) alien.
I have been using audiokonverter for some time with my Mandriva 2010.2 system. It recently is giving me problems. If I try to extract an ogg audio file from an mp4 video I get this error:
# Now converting: /home/steve/Desktop/filename.mp4
# DISPLAYED REMAINING TIME MAY BE WRONG!
Writing metadata...
Error opening input file '/home/steve/Desktop//filename.ogg'.
Done.
Any suggestions?
to make it permanent you could add the command to /etc/rc.d/rc.local
I use xset dpms 0 360 420
this command disables DPMS standby and sets the DPMS suspend time to 360 seconds and the off time to 420 seconds