adamw

USB audio devices almost all use a standard interface which is supported by Linux. The mention that 'no special drivers are needed' on Windows is a very good indication this is such a device. That means it will plug and play on Linux - the snd-usb-audio driver will be loaded to handle it. This should work on any vaguely recent distro. The only caveat is that if you have another sound device on your system, the USB mic will likely become the *second* (i.e. not default) device. You have to make sure whatever software you're using has a setting to change the device it uses for input, and set that to the USB mic. otherwise you should be good. (I use a USB sound device, a Turtle Beach Audio Advantage, on my system, without problems - I only use it for output but input should be basically the same).

Here's the promised follow up: Following up the previous post on this topic, the issue with missing pubkey files leading to NOKEY errors is now resolved on the majority of mirror servers. The following servers from the list used by the Mandriva tools have been tested and found to be GOOD: ftp://ftp.mandrake.ikoula.com/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.iasi.roedu.net/mirrors/ftp.mand...official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.mandriva.co...official/2008.0 ftp://ramses.wh2.tu-dresden.de/pub/mirror...official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.uwsg.indiana.edu/linux/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/pub/...official/2008.0 http://gd.tuwien.ac.at/pub/linux/Mandrakel...official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.lip6.fr/pub/linux/distributions...official/2008.0 ftp://carroll.cac.psu.edu/pub/linux/distr...official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.surfnet.nl/pub/os/Linux/distr/M...official/2008.0 http://mandriva.dcc.fc.up.pt/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.pbone.net/pub/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.esat.net/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://mirrors.secsup.org/pub/linux/mandra...official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.ps.pl/mirrors/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.tuniv.szczecin.pl/pub/linux/man...official/2008.0 The following servers have been tested and found to be BAD: http://www.gtlib.cc.gatech.edu/pub/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.rhnet.is/pub/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.cica.es/pub/Linux/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.ciril.fr/pub/linux/mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 ftp://sunsite.cnlab-switch.ch/mirror/mand...official/2008.0 ftp://mirror.switch.ch/mirror/mandrake/official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/mandrake/Mandrake...official/2008.0 ftp://ftp.nara.wide.ad.jp/pub/Linux/Mandr...official/2008.0 The following servers could not be tested as they were full: ftp://ftp.u-strasbg.fr/pub/linux/distribu...official/2008.0 ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrakelinux/official/2008.0 If you are using one of the servers listed as GOOD, you may be able to resolve the problem by running this command: urpmi.update –force-key If you are using one of the servers listed as BAD, or if the –force-key command does not work to resolve the problem, you can resolve the problem by removing your repositories and re-adding them using one of the servers listed as GOOD. Tomorrow we will test all servers again, and remove those that have still not properly synchronized the fix from the official server list. Again, we apologize for any inconvenience caused by this issue.

This is for anyone getting NOKEY errors trying to install packages from the online repositories for Mandriva Linux 2008. The problem was that the pubkey files, which contain the keys used to sign packages in each repository, were missing from the media_info directories in the 2008 tree, so when it was adding the repositories, Mandriva could not get the key for each repository. Since the repository seemed to have no key associated with it, but the packages were signed, when you tried to install any package, Mandriva would give you the NOKEY warning. This has been fixed on our master mirror around two hours before this post. I have checked several mirrors and found that at the time of writing this post, a couple of mirrors have synced up with the fix already, but most have not. Once all the mirrors sync up with the fix, the problem will not occur again for anyone adding repositories. However, if you have already set up your repositories, the problem will not be fixed automatically. You must remove your repositories using the repository configuration tool, which can be found in the Mandriva Control Center, or the urpmi.removemedia command line tool. You can then set the repositories up again (using the repository configuration tool, or urpmi.addmedia) and you should no longer see the errors. I will post a follow-up message when my checks indicate that most mirrors are synced up with the fix. We’re sorry for the inconvenience.

That's great news. I'm glad it's working well for you. Thanks for the kind words!

neddie: no, you're quite right, it's just the 'mandriva.com not really finished' thing again as we discussed elsewhere. if you check the page today you should notice the Bittorrent link is more prominent (and also, the FTP / HTTP site download code actually works, always a good thing :>) zibi: the X.org in 2008 is a hybrid of 7.2 and 7.3, really. Since X.org is modular these days that's entirely feasible and indeed most distros releasing in this cycle have bits of both. There are bits of 7.2 and bits of 7.3 in there. However, you don't need to worry about the ATI driver. It's packaged for Mandriva in the official non-free repository, and if you use the One edition of 2008 it should automatically use the non-free driver right out of the box, nothing needed on your end. If you use the Free edition, it won't, as Free contains only free / open source software. However, you can enable the non-free repository after installation - see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Basic_tas...tions_available - and then run through the graphics card configuration tool again, re-selecting your card family. It will then ask if you want to use the proprietary driver. Tell it you do, then restart X or just reboot, and you should be ready. :)

I'm not sure tickless timer is the default even in 2.6.23, so the 2.6.23.rc4.mm1 kernel you're testing *may* not have the tickless timer enabled. You can check by looking at its config file to see what CONFIG_NO_HZ is set to. If it's Y, that means the tickless timer is enabled. If it's N, that means it's not. As I understand it, the bug, limitation, call it what you will, is in VMware (VirtualBox has the same problem, haven't checked qemu etc yet), it just doesn't cope with a tickless timer very well.

I suspect you have an NVIDIA or ATI card and you also updated the kernel? in that case, install the matching kernel-source-stripped package for your kernel.

sglafata: Mandriva 2008 has the Liberation fonts installed out of the box. The default font set for Mandriva is the DejaVu set, which is an extension of Vera with extra non-Roman characters added. It's thus pointless to install Vera on Mandriva (and it's not in the repos), as DejaVu is everything Vera is and more. The Liberation fonts are used on 2008 whenever a Microsoft font (Arial, Times / Times New Roman, Courier New, Verdana, I think maybe a few others) is explicitly requested by an application or document. As mentioned, when no particular font is requested, or just the standard 'sans', 'serif' and 'monotype' aliases, DejaVu is used.

You might want to be a bit more specific - preferably with screenshots - about exactly what you think looks bad, and what you're expecting to see. Fonts are a very subjective thing, so it's not possible for anyone to know exactly how you want yours set up from the information you've provided. The PLF thing you're thinking about is to do with the bytecode interpreter issue. Freetype has an element called a bytecode interpreter, to do with hinting, that is subject to a patent (an Apple patent, IIRC). Therefore the official Mandriva Freetype package has it disabled. The PLF package has it enabled. Some people prefer the look of fonts with the bytecode interpreter, some actually prefer them without (me, for instance). So, yes, you can install the libfreetype6 package from PLF if you want to use the bytecode interpreter, this *may* be your issue (but it is, as I said, impossible for me to tell for sure). All you have to do then is log out of your desktop and in again. Note that someone is technically breaking the law when you do this, as you are in the U.S. I'm not entirely sure if it's technically you or the site you download from that breaks the law, I am not a lawyer and patent law is rather obscure. If you're not comfortable with this, you can download the freetype2 .src.rpm from the /official/2008.0/SRPMS/main/release directory on a Mandriva mirror and rebuild it with the --with-plf parameter. Distributing *source code* which infringes a patent is not illegal (which is why Mandriva can have the offending code in its .src.rpm but not its binary packages), and you rebuilding and using that source code on your own machine is *also* not illegal. Only the distribution of compiled code breaks patent law.

OK, another big response :) ac_dispatcher: you can upgrade from release to release using the package manager (urpmi), yes. We test this some, but not *heavily*. It is possible you will hit a few problems that need to be worked around manually (for instance, sometimes you need to remove a package to let the upgrade proceed and then reinstall it later). This generally depends on how much stuff you installed. Installing third party packages can also sometimes affect the likelihood of this form of upgrade working. Personally, I use this upgrade method on my web and mailservers as they have a fairly small set of packages installed. 2007.0 to 2007.1 worked fine, I've yet to get around to upgrading them to 2008.0. ilia_kr: yeah, the USB drivers are in the kernel, so effectively we said the same thing. What you can do is install kernel-linus - which is a stock upstream kernel, no patches - and boot to that, see if you have the same problem. If you do, the bug is in the upstream kernel, not in any Mandriva patch, so you can file a bug on the kernel Bugzilla. If you do that and it gets fixed, you could then file a Mandriva bug, referencing the upstream fix, asking for it to be included in a Mandriva kernel update. Sorry, I don't know about the menu shadows thing, other than that a bug has already been filed, I believe. reiver: the code in the Mandriva tools to add repositories is fine and works perfectly. What problems people have had with adding repositories on 2008 have been more related to the mirror lists that it depends on (hosted at api.mandriva.com) not being properly created / updated. They should be mostly okay now, and adding repositories via rpmdrake works okay (I've tested this), except for a NOKEY problem which I'm about to post a new thread about (see http://blog.mandriva.com/2007/10/10/public...rors-with-2008/ ). pmpatrick: actually, no-one's paying us for those. The marketing department apparently just thought people would appreciate having them. I wish they'd asked me (y'know, the *user* representative, sigh) first. D'oh. You can, as you found, disable them in Firefox, or you can just uninstall the packages. The guy whose company makes Blogrovr came to the official MDV forums to make it clear that they hadn't paid us (or even *asked* us) to include it in Mandriva, and he seems like a nice guy, so please don't blame them. :) On the Broadcom, yes, unfortunately, there is a problem with switching to ndiswrapper if a native driver is available. The problem is that the updated hardware detection system used in 2008 (and 2007.1, it has the same problem) will *always* load the native driver for the hardware at boot time, even if you told drakconnect you wanted to use ndiswrapper. Having the native driver loaded prevents ndiswrapper working. This is possible to fix, we just need to add some code to drakconnect so it knows how to override the default hardware -> module association. I'm going to do my best to make sure this is done for 2008.1. The good news, as you found, is that bcm43xx actually *works*, rather well, in 2008. :) If you're still interested in switching to ndiswrapper, PM me and I'll give you further info on how the detection system works and how to override it. scarecrow: urpmi hasn't been rewritten from scratch, not for 2008, not at any time previously actually. rpmdrake was a couple of times, but not for 2008. what exactly do you find problematic about them? Thanks!

Try using this kernel parameter: nohz=off when booting the Mandriva guest. Apparently, tickless kernel timers can confuse virtualization systems. To add kernel parameters, just hit F2 at the bootloader screen and type - so just hit F2, type: nohz=off and hit enter.

ilia, yep, it's probably set to a different language. A few people have reported it getting set to Spanish, but I couldn't reproduce and can't figure out why. Just go into the preferences and set it back to English. The USB thing sounds like a driver problem. Are there errors related in /var/log/messages ?

There are several ways you can upgrade Mandriva via a network connection. You *can* upgrade from one edition to another simply using urpmi: remove your 2007.1 repositories, set up 2008.0 repositories, do 'urpmi --auto-update' , and you've got 2008, basically. this method sometimes hits problems and needs a bit of hand holding, but it does work. You can do a network installation of Mandriva (this has always been possible), and the installer has an upgrade option. For instructions on doing a network install, see http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/Docs/Installin...or_the_Internet . Indeed you cannot do upgrade installs via the One CD, but you can do upgrade installs via the 3-CD Free edition. There's no GNOME version of One for the present. There may be one in future. Once we have a definite plan about that, we'll make it known.

neddie: congratulations, you have successfully detected that the new website was let out of its cage about a week too early. :) the thing is, we didn't want to waste a bunch of time updating the old website (whose CMS sucks *rocks*) for 2008, as we knew the new one was coming. but the new one wasn't really quite finished off in time for 2008. we took the decision to get the site just-about-working and release 2008, as we felt it'd be silly to delay the distro itself for several days just to finish off the website. so, yes, the new mandriva.com - while it's tons better than the old one - isn't quite finished yet. yes, the download script is a bit wonky, we are working on it. and yes, I spotted the 'professionnal' typo (it should really be 'enterprise', anyway) days ago but I don't actually have the power to edit that particular bit, sigh. and yes, there are a lot of broken links. all broken links are currently redirected to www.mandriva.com/archives . That's the old site, archived, and the idea is that whatever you were looking for is probably still in there somewhere. :) so, yep, you're right - sorry, and please bear with us while we finish up the site. we are working on it actively and it should be okay within a few days. for now if you want to download 2008 it's probably best to go with the torrents - http://torrent.mandriva.com/public - anyway. the mirrors will be getting overloaded.

you could try using the Free edition. that uses a traditional installer and will use the open source 'nv' driver, not the proprietary 'nvidia' driver. Maybe it'll work better for your hardware.

apbsa: there's one other legal DVD player for Linux - PowerDVD. we evaluated both and made a choice for LinDVD. it's not a *big* field. :) Cedega was hugely popular in 2007. Yes, there are good native Linux games available, but very little on the scale of professionalism and quality that you see in the best Windows games. Thanks for all the kind words :)

We're proud to announce that Mandriva Linux 2008 is now available for download via BitTorrent, and on the network of public mirror servers. The result of six months of heavy development and testing, 2008 includes all the latest software and many enhancements over previous Mandriva Linux releases. You will find KDE 3.5.7 and the new GNOME 2.20 already integrated, a solid kernel 2.6.22.9 with fair scheduling support, OpenOffice.org 2.2.1, cutting-edge 3D-accelerated desktop courtesy of Compiz Fusion 0.5.2, Mozilla Firefox 2.0.0.6, and everything else you've come to expect from the latest Mandriva Linux release. We have integrated a reworked hardware detection sub-system, with support for a lot of new devices (particularly graphics cards, sound cards and wireless chips). Also, the addition of new features and ongoing improvements to the renowned Mandriva tools continues, including a wizard to import Windows documents and settings, the new network configuration center, and improvements to the Mandriva software management tools. You can read about the most exciting new features of Mandriva Linux 2008 in depth in the Release Tour. The Release Notes contain important information on changes from previous releases. The Errata will contain information on any future known issues and solutions for them. Mandriva Linux 2008 was developed by the Mandriva development community, based around the Cooker development distribution. This open, community-driven development system has been in place since 1998, making it one of the longest-standing open source development communities around. The involvement of the Mandriva development community helps us to make Mandriva Linux one of the largest, most up-to-date, integrated, internationalized and standardized distributions available, for which we thank our contributors greatly. We're proud of the standardization efforts included in Mandriva Linux 2008, including support for the Freedesktop.org XDG menu, user directories and icon theme specifications. Mandriva Linux 2008 is available for download free of charge at the Mandriva website. The One installation CD is the recommended download with everything you need to start using Mandriva Linux 2008: it comes with a full KDE desktop and application suite, NVIDIA and ATI proprietary video card drivers, Intel wireless firmware, Adobe Flash and Sun Java browser plugins, all included. Enjoy your brand new Mandriva Linux 2008 system!

Announcement: the 2008 tree has now hit mirrors. /official/2008.0 exists and is populated. anyone who has installed a 2008 beta or release candidate and is using Cooker repositories at present *should now switch to the 2008.0 repositories* if they want to stick with 2008. Cooker may unfreeze at any time (though it'll probably be another week or so).

hey, that's good news. Glad to hear it :)

arctic: our GNOME packages are pretty simple, really. they're very close to upstream, Fred keeps them as close as he can, he's very down on external patches. as I said, I run GNOME only on my system, which is obviously heavily used, and I've never seen any problem like you describe. do you have any idea what nautilus is *doing*? artee / qandd: yep, the initial downloads to early seeders aren't super-fast; this demonstrates the need for early seeding. :)

What happens exactly when you try the commands in that blog post? Can you try and get the contents of the file /var/log/messages out of the system for us to look at? thanks!

arctic: I've always run GNOME, and I don't see any problem with it at the moment. I don't know what's up with your setup, but...it's not a general problem... and yes, there's still some very last-minute fixes going on at the moment, I saw a changelog for Evince go through a minute ago...

Please post your .spec file and we'll see what's wrong with it.

please do it the way I suggested. It is the easiest way. No manual installation of packages is required. If you install the packages manually you still have to change the actual X configuration, which you should do using the graphics card configuration tool - which would install the package for you anyway. so there's no point installing them manually. it's just added complication.

current schedule is release to early seeders tomorrow, public release early next week.