adamw

This is already up on several news sites, but I thought it'd be good to have it here too. I've been working on making synchronization of Windows Mobile 5, 6 and 6.1 devices really easy with 2008 Spring. There's a video of the process at www.youtube.com and instructions for the bold who are on 2008 Spring pre-releases already at wiki.mandriva.com.

Installing laptop kernel is a known bug, it's in the Errata - the desktop kernel somehow got left off the images, so the installer falls back to the laptop one. Sound should be handled by PulseAudio so you *should* be able to get it working without blacklisting anything. Try running 'pavucontrol' and messing around with the settings there.

You would appear to be violating the GPL, for all packages that are licensed under it, by distributing binaries without distributing the source or providing a clear written offer to distribute the source. You should rectify this as soon as possible. Easiest way is simply to add a SRPMS repository. In general, we'd like to have all packaging work for Mandriva in the official repositories - it creates less trouble than having third party repositories. If you send me the .src.rpms for new packages you've created or ones you've updated compared to the official repositories, I can check them out and upload them to the official /backports repositories. If your packaging skills seem to be fine, we could probably give you a contributor account so you could work directly in the official repositories. Thanks for the work :)

Kicking off the 2008 Spring development cycle in earnest, the first alpha is here. This alpha features X.org 7.3, KDE 3.5.8, KDE 4.0 RC2 (in /contrib), GNOME 2.21, kernel 2.6.24, OpenOffice.org 2.3, new NVIDIA and ATI proprietary drivers, PulseAudio by default and more. It is in a fairly stable and reliable state, though as always, we do not suggest you use it in a production environment. It is available in Free and One editions, with i586 and x86-64 DVDs for the Free edition and an i586, KDE-based CD for the One edition. For this pre-release, we are particularly interested in testing PulseAudio and hardware detection. Please report any problems with sound functionality, and any mis-detected or un-detected hardware, to Bugzilla. Of course, please also report any other problems you run into. You can also discuss the alpha in the official forums (and here, of course!). Download locations are available on the Wiki page: it may take a few hours for the files to be copied to all mirrors.

Try 'modprobe -f gspca'.

It's not really imitating Fedora - we've had Pulse in MDV for a while, and I've been running it on my system for a year or so now. The idea of switching to it by default was mooted during 2007 development and again (by me) during 2007 Spring development, but at that time it was rejected. Just that now Pulse has reached a point where it's really a viable alternative. All distros have been wanting something like it for a long time now. Of course, the work that Fedora's done so far has been great, and we have adopted a few of the things they've worked on into MDV as part of this change, so of course that's a helpful foundation. We are testing Pulse quite extensively and working on fixing as many problems as possible, so hopefully people shouldn't have any bad experiences with it. Of course it'd be great for people to test the alphas / betas and report any problems, when they come out.

In more detail: no, because we're talking about RPM *the application*, not using Fedora / SUSE RPM *packages*. The short story - RPM development hit some controversy a while back and basically split into two forks, one maintained by Jeff Johnson (the original author of RPM) and one continued by the Red Hat folks. Both RH / Fedora and SUSE use this fork. We initially went with the J.J. fork, but now we're switching to the other one. It really doesn't have any implications for cross-distro package compatibility.

We're currently working on the possibility of an upgrade path for users of the previous Flash versions. If we are able to come up with an upgrade path that works to our satisfaction, we'll provide more information at that point. It's not a certain deal yet.

There was a problem with a recent kernel update which may have caused this issue. Please re-run MandrivaUpdate and install all available updates, then re-run the graphics card configuration tool, re-select your graphics card group, say 'yes' when asked if you want to use the proprietary driver, and re-start the system. This should hopefully resolve the problem. Thanks, and sorry for the trouble.

Yep, we released the new version of the Flash today. :) It's based on 2008, with all the updated software and better hardware compatibility that suggests (it also comes with 2008 post-release updates). Also has some neat new features of its own. It's 4GB, but with a $10 / €10 price drop from the previous 2007-based 4GB model: $89 or €79, free shipping. For anyone who doesn't know about the Flash: it's a USB stick with Mandriva pre-loaded, basically, and it's bootable. So you can plug it into a PC (any PC), boot from the USB, and up comes your Mandriva desktop with all your data (that's stored on the Flash). Neat, yes? Buy it from the Store.

These three are the only you actually needed: vboxadd-kernel-2.6.22.12-desktop-1mdv-1.5.0-6mdv2008.0.i586 vboxvfs-kernel-2.6.22.12-desktop-1mdv-1.5.0-6mdv2008.0.i586 virtualbox-kernel-2.6.22.12-desktop-1mdv-1.5.0-6mdv2008.0.i586 there was, unfortunately, a process error which meant the kernel update was released without the external module packages (the Virtualbox modules, NVIDIA modules, ATI modules etc) being rebuilt and released at the same time, resulting in this situation. They have now been released and updated (as you can see from the existence of the above packages), but the -latest 'metapackages' (which ensure that MandrivaUpdate automatically installs these updates) still haven't been uploaded, for some reason; Vincent is sorting that out at present. The correct process is for the kernel packages, module packages and -latest metapackages to all be built and released simultaneously - as you mentioned, this was done correctly for 2.6.22.9-2mdv, so that update went very smoothly. The kernel and security teams are currently working with each other to ensure that this problem never happens again, so all future kernel updates should go as smoothly as 2.6.22.9-2mdv did, and not bumpy like this one :(

oh dear, I changed it already. I'll just make it something vague. :) did you report your problem?

Please see: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandr...to_880MB_of_RAM the reason for this issue is simple, and you didn't need to buy the Powerpack edition to resolve it, but I hope you're enjoying that edition anyway! The way to resolve it for the One edition is listed at the link above. Due to the way One works, it can only install the kernel it actually uses. And it has to use the 'desktop586' kernel, which supports only 1GB of RAM, in order to have the widest possible hardware support (if it used the 'desktop' kernel, i586 systems could not boot One). The other editions - Free and Powerpack - use a traditional installer, so they can simply install the kernel most appropriate to the system being used (which is usually the 'desktop' kernel, supporting up to 4GB of RAM).

There was a mistake with the second recent kernel update (2.6.22.12-1mdv): the external kernel modules (things like NVIDIA and ATI drivers) were not updated at the same time. So when you updated the kernel, you lost all that stuff. Sounds to me like you lost your NVIDIA driver, causing all this trouble. Mandriva will have automatically switched over to the free 'nv' driver, which doesn't do 3D acceleration, so of course Compiz is broken, causing all the other stuff. We've now uploaded the updated drivers. The 'metapackages' which cause them to be automatically updated still don't seem to have been updated, so you may not see the updated driver if you run MandrivaUpdate, but you should be able to install it manually via rpmdrake already (it's likely that the package you want is nvidia-current-kernel-2.6.22.12-desktop-1mdv-100.14.19-1mdv2008.0 , but you may be running the 'desktop586' or 'laptop' kernel instead). If you installed the kernel update and that package before rebooting, everything should work fine. Or you could just wait a few days before updating, and when you do the update, make sure NVIDIA packages as well as the kernel are updated. As I mentioned, this *is* all meant to be handled in such a way that you don't have to do anything special, but unfortunately it got screwed up this time. The kernel and security teams are working together to ensure this does not happen again with future kernel updates. Sorry for the inconvenience.

No, I'm afraid not. We don't add advanced options to rpmdrake as it is primarily intended to be a simple interface to the most common packaging tasks. Is there a reason you can't just use urpmi for this? For advanced operations, command line tools are generally more efficient.

I wrote the errata entry based on the security team's advisory, I'll update it to be less specific. thanks!

There seems to be an obvious possibility tyme is overlooking: the screen resolution's wrong. Go to the Mandriva Control Center ('Configure your computer'), run the graphics card configuration tool, and check what resolution is being used. Is it the correct one for your laptop? Laptop screens (all LCD screens) have a 'native resolution', and you *really* want to use that resolution. Using any other resolution will just make the screen look horrible (for unavoidable technical reasons).

oh, good, just in time for our backport of 8.42. sigh :)

Have you actually created a directory for Courier to use to store mail, and configured Courier to point to this directory? Courier uses the maildir format for storing mail by default, not mbox. mbox stores an entire account in a single file, maildir stores all messages as single files within a standardized folder structure. For instance, on my mail server, I have a ~/Maildir directory , and this line in /etc/courier/imapd : MAILDIRPATH=Maildir this is the default, so if you don't change this, you need to create a ~/Maildir folder for each user. If you want to use a different folder name, change that parameter and create the appropriate folder.

The intention is that kernel upgrades should happen automatically and everything should 'just work', so when this doesn't happen I'm interested in what went wrong. So the situation now is that the cameras are working? I'm still a little unsure on exactly what you did and what changed :\

Ian, send me an email and I'll make sure you get hooked up with someone who can make this work out. Sorry for the trouble you've had so far.

Do you have kernel-desktop-devel-latest installed? If you do, it should 'just work' when you boot to the new kernel.

actually I wasn't busy at all, I was on holiday. =) went on a nice bus trip to Banff and back: http://www.flickr.com/photos/adamwill/ as you can see, the weather's positively tropical here in western Canada :D I think the driver used would not have changed from 2007 to 2008. snd-intel8x0m is a *modem* driver; it's not, AFAIK, intended to work with regular sound cards. I think it should be using snd-intel8x0.

There's no emu driver for Linux. The cards are excellent, but not a good choice for Linux. All USB audio devices use the same driver because there's an industry standard protocol for USB audio (just as there is for USB mass storage). It doesn't mean all devices function identically, so don't worry that it will restrict the capabilities of the device. The reason why different PCI cards may use the same driver is similar; it means they use the same control chipset. Again, just using the same driver doesn't mean the features of the card will be restricted. By all accounts the Audiophile cards are a good choice. A higher-end option I've heard good things about is the RME line. An alternative approach is to use a very cheap / simple card in your system purely as a digital transport and go external with the decoding / encoding; this is the approach I take personally (I use a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage USB adapter and run its SP/DIF output to a Firestone Audio DAC).

I don't believe the Savage driver implements all the features needed for Compiz, unfortunately. AFAIK only Intel, ATI and NVIDIA hardware can run Compiz well.