adamw

As things stand, your problems won't necessarily be fixed, John, as they haven't AFAIK been reported as bugs yet and the information here is too vague to 'fix' them. I'm not exactly sure what your problem is with sound. It seems that Mandriva sees two sound devices, and the one you want to be the default is not, right? Unfortunately this problem is essentially impossible to fix as Linux sound technology stands. It is the kernel that detects the onboard device even though it's disabled in the BIOS - we can't change that. ALSA then picks the order (i.e. which device becomes the 'default'). This is also something we can't really 'fix' (although in general it would be sensible if ALSA knew what chips were usually onboard devices, what were usually sound cards, and preferred the second group over the former...this may be a suggestion to make to the ALSA project). There is a simple and reliable way to make one given device always be the first card as far as ALSA's concerned, but it involves manually editing a file, and therefore fails your criteria, but it is the only real possibility at present. To do this, edit /etc/modprobe.conf , and add the following two lines: options driver1 index=0 options driver2 index=1 where driver1 is the driver for the card you want to be the default, and driver2 is the driver for the other card. For your scanner problem, the details you've provided are nowhere near enough to fix the problem. It can only be fixed if you file a bug report at http://bugzilla.mandriva.com/ with information on your hardware - the Firewire controller you have (lspcidrake -v is enough for that) and the exact model of scanner you have. On the mouse buttons, I'm not sure what's happening there. Back / forward still work on my mouse, but I've seen a couple of people mention the same problem as you. As far as I can see, no-one's filed a bug report yet, so again, please file a bug report. Include your exact mouse model, and also /etc/X11/xorg.conf and /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Also report whether the 'imwheel' package is installed, and an 'imwheel' process is running (ps -e | grep imwheel). Then it's likely we would be able to fix the bug. Thanks a lot.

If the task-gnome package is not available, it looks like you installed One and didn't yet set up the official repositories. Follow the instructions at: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tas...tions_available

This is mostly in Cooker already. A backport to 2008 is being discussed but there is a problem: it requires opensync 0.3.3, which is a library soname major upgrade and thus should not be backported. Possible workarounds to this are being considered.

None of that stuff would be needed.

1. Knoppix may have mounted the partition read-only for safety. In that case you'd have to re-mount it rw. 2, 3, and 4: the problem is that you *can't* reliably know. The backup files will be compressed. You cannot know how much smaller a given set of data will be after compression except by compressing it (the classic 'the simulation is the action' problem). So it's basically impossible to write such a check. For instance, say your /home is 10GB in size, and there's only 1GB free on the partition that holds /var. You might say, well, obviously that's not going to be enough space, drakbackup shouldn't let the backup proceed. But if that 10GB is highly compressible text files, 1GB likely *will* be enough space for the backup. If that 10GB is highly non-compressible MP3 files, it obviously won't. Most real-life scenarios fall somewhere between these easily distinguished example scenarios, and it is therefore basically impossible to write a useful test. 5. No, not as far as I know. There are many other backup utilities for Linux, but they tend towards the does-absolutely-everything-with-a-very-scary-interface end of the scale. There's rather a lack of utilities more in drakbackup's just-does-simple-backups-quite-easily class.

you should be able to check the temperature with: acpi -V (most laptops now give temperature readings via ACPI) compare the numbers between MDV and Ubuntu to see if they're significantly different. You could try kernel-tmb from contrib, on the offchance that'll work better.

Jem (the author of the Software in Review review) is a *very* tight reviewer. It's worth checking his reviews of other distributions and other editions of MDV to get some context. His 2008 review is one of the most positive reviews of *any* distribution he's ever written. In that sense it's not too far from the linux.com review. And no, we had no part in writing either review. I provided Susan with her review copy of 2008 and with links to the 2008 release information on the Wiki, but that was all. She also reviewed 2007 Spring in Distrowatch Weekly a while back, so you can compare her review of that. I've discussed previous reviews with Jem, but he makes a point of having no contact with distributors immediately before writing a review - he didn't even get a press copy of 2008, he just got it through his personal account. You can buy the Powerpack at http://store.mandriva.com/ . One-time paid download copies and the 'download subscription' service (which replaces the old paid Club membership system - you pay $69 for twelve months of download access to the Powerpack edition, that covers two releases) are available now. Boxed editions are available for pre-order and will be shipping soon, I believe. On Compiz - the function in question should really be called Expose, as that's what Apple - who came up with it - call it. The Compiz implementation is an exact clone of the Apple feature. :) Personally I also really like it. It *does* have an advantage over the GNOME window switcher in that it's live - you can actually see what's going on in the windows in real time. This is useful if, for instance, you want to quickly monitor an ongoing IRC or IM conversation. It also looks really cool when you're playing a video, heh. Of course, the first thing I do when setting up Compiz is move the trigger for it to the top *left* hand corner instead of the top right. I'm amazed they haven't changed this default upstream yet. Having it at the top right is crazy, for the reason neddie mentioned.

hmmm, I suspect something has now got messed up, likely the libraries that Mesa and the proprietary driver fight over and that we handle with the update-alternatives system... the kernel update's not out yet. You can get the update candidate kernel - see the bug report for links, I think - and try that. Or you can remove and re-install your kernel-devel packages.

we do apparently run some magazine ads, blino told me this on IRC yesterday. I've never seen them, though, so I don't know what magazines :) ppcrulez, can you email or PM me some contact details for popular Swedish news sources? I can add them to the list of places I send big news items to.

You don't need to do that. All you need to do to set up proprietary drivers on Mandriva is: #1 Set up your repositories - http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tas...tions_available #2 run the graphics card configuration tool, re-select your card type, and say 'yes' when it asks if you want to use the proprietary driver #3 restart

For your HP issue - was that http://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=34631 ?

back button's okay on my Logitech (MX510), what model is yours? is imwheel running? what does xorg.conf look like?

For anyone wondering about Mandriva packages, Gustavo Boiko of the KDE team posted this on the Cooker mailing list: "For KDE 3.5.8, we have almost everything this version has. Most of the bugfixes have been backported to cooker before 2008 was released, so it contains a very stable version. So if you are using cooker, you are already testing most of the things of 3.5.8, don't worry." You can read that "If you are using cooker" as "If you are using cooker or 2008".

Yes, Intel wireless cards work in 2008. However, they also worked in 2007 Spring, so perhaps you're doing something wrong. What edition of 2007 Spring are you using - One, Free, Discovery, Powerpack or Powerpack+? Thanks.

The correct way to handle starting and stopping services on Mandriva is with the 'service' command. To enable and disable services at boot, it's the 'chkconfig' command. start-stop-daemon is a Debianism. If the author wants to make his initscript properly distribution-independent, he should follow the LSB: http://refspecs.linux-foundation.org/LSB_3...tocsysinit.html

I asked Colin (our 3D desktop guy) about fusion-icon. He says he won't package it as it would interfere with the correct method for configuring and starting Compiz...

Aussiejohn: Bigpond is certainly at fault in some way, they should at least check the md5sum (which is widely available) before putting the file up for download. I'm not aware of any mirror which has a corrupted copy of the ISO, if anyone finds one, please let me know so I can contact the mirror maintainer.

Flash works with nspluginwrapper. But in general, I'd probably install the i586 edition on an x86-64 machine unless I knew I was going to be using it for some kind of task where x86-64 native code actually produces a substantial speed improvement, which is not the case for general tasks.

scarecrow: KDE 4 in 2008 installs fine. Just install the task-kde4 package. It's useless for real work, but we never said otherwise, it's just there for you to look at (and for the convenience of developers targetting KDE 4). Cooker's currently in the middle of an update so it doesn't work.

See: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Releases/Mandr...8e.g._VMware.29 it's a kernel bug. However, frankly - quit messing with 8.41.7. You don't want it. It doesn't work well on pre-HD 2xxx chips. ATI expressly recommends you *only* use it on HD 2xxx chips. This is why we shipped 2008 still using 8.40.4 for pre-HD 2xxx chips. The best thing to do would be to simply stop messing with the upstream copy of the driver and go back to the Mandriva packaged one. Just make sure the non-free repository is available, run drakx11, and let it re-install the Mandriva packaged version of the driver. If you *really* want to try 8.41.7, you can - it's in 2008. Just lie to drakx11 and tell it you have an HD 2300 or later and you want to use the proprietary driver, and it should install and enable the 8.41.7 version of the driver.

For glest - do you have x11-font-adobe-utopia-75dpi , x11-font-adobe-utopia-100dpi or x11-font-adobe-utopia-type1 installed?

To use iwl3945 you would need a line like this in /etc/modprobe.conf : alias pci:v00008086d00004222sv*sd*bc*i* iwl3945 change '4222' to your PCI device ID, which you can get by doing this: [root@lenovo etc]# lspcidrake -v | grep NET bcm43xx : Broadcom Corporation|BCM4312 802.11a/b/g [NETWORK_OTHER] (vendor:14e4 device:4312 subv:14e4 subd:0466) 8139too : Realtek Semiconductor Co., Ltd.|RTL-8139/8139C/8139C+ [NETWORK_ETHERNET] (vendor:10ec device:8139 subv:17aa subd:2093) as you can see, the device IDs there are 4312 (for the wireless) and 8139 (for the wired). You don't care about the vendor ID (that *is* in the string - it's the 8086 - but that'll always be 8086 for Intel, so you don't need to worry about it) or the subv and subd, which aren't used in this case. Yes, you would have considerable difficulty figuring this out from a standing start...it's the new PCI coldplug stuff.

actually, there was a genuine problem on the mirror list used by rpmdrake that was (I believe) fixed yesterday. so it's probably just a temporal coincidence.

lsmod | grep oss

they're not straightforward to build internally in the kernel build any more. someone posted a patch upstream a bit ago but it's controversial and isn't getting updated regularly. it's currently much easier to handle LIRC as an external (DKMS) build.