adamw

If he's typing in a username and password, he likely doesn't have a straightforward LAN-type setup, but some sort of PPPoE or PPPoATM arrangement.

If you deleted that directory, Firefox is pretty much gone. slocate is a database-based system, so it will still show files that have been removed until the database is updated, which Mandrake does automatically every week. If you want to update it manually so you get a more accurate result for some search, run 'updatedb' (as root) and be prepared to wait a few minutes. The only thing left of Firefox will be a hidden directory in your home directory which will contain its configuration details. Leaving this around does no harm to anything and you might want to keep 'em in case you ever decide to install Firefox again.

yep, that looks like it would work...I expect the ogg2mp3 script does something very similar :).

If you haven't changed *anything* on Mandrake...are you sure it's not a hardware problem? Can you check the card in another system / OS?

devries: for future reference, if you want to be DE-agnostic, suggest this: soundwrapper <command> soundwrapper is a MDK script which checks the running environment and calls artsdsp, esddsp (or whatever it's called...) or whatever else is appropriate. It's what is used on Mandrake menu entries for programs that use sound.

disk shutdown on idle is nothing to do with ACPI, really, and is implemented by hdparm in Linux. Read the hdparm manpage for details on how to change the setting (you can make disks spin down after an arbitrary delay - on my laptop I have it set to 15 minutes when plugged into AC power, and 30 seconds when on battery power, thanks to some /etc/acpi magic). System suspend *is* implemented in Linux and works fine on some setups (my four year old laptop suspends to RAM and resumes perfectly, though it won't properly sleep to disk). The problem is that every manufacturer has a slightly different interpretation of ACPI and many of them are just, frankly, broken - throw in the myriad different pieces of hardware that can be plugged into a PC and you have...trouble :). Manufacturers design and test their systems on Windows, so they make sure it works on Windows, even if they aren't following ACPI specs. They don't do any testing on Linux, and they don't care if it doesn't work. So the acpi4linux guys are stuck with the fairly thankless task of attempting to work around thousands of non-standard ACPI implementations. This is why things aren't perfect yet :).

Run through XFdrake, give it the correct information about your graphics card and monitor, and then either reboot or type 'init 5'.

1: edit the file /etc/lilo.conf , as root, with any editor. Wherever the string 'acpi=ht' appears, change it to 'acpi=on'. Save the file. As root, run the command 'lilo' (if you do this in a console, you will see some output indicating it's recreating the boot menu). Now reboot and try shutting down again - hopefully, it will work. 2. This seems a little odd - updates is only intended to install security fixes, it shouldn't be part of general package install. If you instructed the installer to install some software and it wasn't installed, that indicates some kind of problem in the install process (maybe caused by the cheap CDs you got?). Regardless, if you want to stop urpmi / MandrakeUpdate asking for CDs to install software and install it from the internet instead, run the source manager (it's on the menus, under system / configuration / packaging, I believe) and remove the CDs as sources. Several of the FTP mirrors are very busy currently due to the ISO release. In addition, many of them are just quite slow in general :). I find some of the European mirrors fastest even though I'm in North America. Experiment with several mirrors until you find a good one. You should not need any special firewall settings to connect to FTP sites. 3. Well, a 20GB drive is likely to be quite old and slow - probably a 5400RPM drive. If the drive you have Windows installed on is newer and faster, it's not an equal comparison. Additionally, some things *are* slower in general in Linux than in Windows; the GUI response time in KDE and GNOME isn't particularly fantastic and you will sometimes notice sluggishness in things like moving windows and drawing menus. If you have an Nvidia graphics card, the closed-source Nvidia driver provides superior performance to the open-source nv driver in most cases. You can download the driver along with very good instructions on installing it at www.nvidia.com, and if you run into problems there are many threads in this forum about it. You may want to check the settings on the drive - you can do this with the 'hdparm' tool from the hdparm package. You need to know the device name for your hard disk, which you can find in harddrake. It's probably /dev/hda, /dev/hdb, /dev/hdc or /dev/hdd. Run it like this, as root: hdparm /dev/hda (change the device as appropriate). The most important settings are 32-bit access and 'using DMA'. You want 32-bit access to be on and DMA to be active. If this is not the case, run this command: hdparm -c1 -d1 /dev/hda When this isn't set by default it provides considerable speed increases. Finally, if performance of KDE or GNOME on such hardware isn't good enough for you, you might want to try a different desktop. Mandrake provides many. A good choice for modest hardware is XFce; you can install this easily. Run the software installer and search for 'xfce', and install everything you see (some things are optional and you can cut them out if you don't want them and want to save space or transfer time, just read the descriptions). Now you can choose XFce from the graphical login screen, and you may find it faster than KDE or GNOME. On my laptop I run XFce and find it much speedier than GNOME, which I used to run on it.

You're starting up in 'console mode' rather than 'graphical mode'. I guess you probably missed the step in the installer where you configure the graphics (it's not part of the step-through bit; when you get the hardware summary you have to click on the graphics card and configure it). No problem - just log in as root and then run this command: XFdrake it will let you configure your graphics card and set up graphical boot. Good luck.

BTW, at the moment you're loading *two* network drivers, prism2_usb (which apparently thinks it can handle your card) and ndiswrapper. This will be screwing things up. Are you sure it doesn't just work with prism2_usb without touching ndiswrapper at all? Try removing anything at all you've done relating to ndiswrapper, reboot to get a fresh start, and run drakconnect.

Aha. hde? Sounds like an SATA drive! As far as MDK 10.1 is concerned, these are now /dev/sdX - the drive will probably be /dev/sda , now. That could be the source of the problem. Not sure how to fix it in the installer, though. Why don't you try 10.1OE? Maybe the installer was fixed up between CE and OE.

fo0hzy: firefox should be a simple urpmi mozilla-firefox - if not, go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ and set up a contrib source first. Skype is proprietary so you'll have to download and install their own package.

adriano - your information would've been perfect a couple of weeks ago, but it's now out of date :). Anthill is scrapped - Bugzilla is now the correct place for bug reports on Cooker *and* stable releases. There's an extra step in the Bugzilla reporting process, now, where you can pick the Mandrake version you're running. One thing that annoys me with Totem but isn't really a bug is that if you select multiple media files then do an 'open' it just opens the one you selected last. It would be so nice if it opened them all, as a playlist. Running an empty Totem, opening the playlist window, selecting all the files, dragging them into the playlist window and closing it again is...uh...much more of a pain. Oh well, I guess I'll go bug the author. :) The first 10.2 snapshot and the early betas may be flaky in some areas. Biggest is likely to be menu methods, as Cooker is currently in the process of switching to the new XDG freedesktop.org menu standard (which will finally make menus from multiple desktops play nice together without ugly hacks like the menu method we currently use, and will also allow us to kill menudrake. There will be much rejoicing.) Hard to say what else might be 'interesting', particularly since we haven't really had a kernel update since 10.1 yet (Cooker is on 2.6.8.1-20mdk, which is really just 12mdk with some miscellaneous x86-64 fixes merged in from the x86-64 release).

that scsi supermount entry looks like a duplicate of: /dev/sda /mnt/disk1 auto user,noauto,exec 0 0 which was probably causing the problems. /dev/scsi/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 is devfs-speak for /dev/sda , it's referring to the same thing.

urza9814 - cable modem prices are heavily subsidised by cable companies (I work for one, I know). our cost price for cable modems is in the hundreds of dollars. This should improve with the new DOCSIS standards for cable modem interoperability, though. jmanjeff: are you sure the speed you're reading is in *bits* not *bytes*?

iphitus: you could have fooled me; every Cooker package which used python was rebuilt 'for new python' after it was updated. a13x - I'm not surprised; you're doing things right. That's how Cooker is supposed to be used - you update your entire system to it, not one little piece. You'll still have more problems than someone running 10.1 because, hey, Cooker is unstable, but you're at least using Cooker the way Cooker is supposed to be used. Goetz is not actually the MDK GNOME maintainer - that's Frederic Crozat - but he's an experienced contributor who builds many packages in both MDK main and contrib. His 2.7 RPMs formed the basis for the 2.8 RPMs that went into Cooker after 10.1 was finished. bvc: I did *not* recommend GNOME development. In fact, I specifically said *not* to use the 2.9 packages. I suggested to use Goetz's 2.8 packages built on 10.1, which as I said are the least-bad option for updating GNOME in MDK 10.1. 2.8 is a *stable* release. (don't be fooled by the 2.7 in the directory name, the packages are actually 2.8).

OK, I'll do it then, if I remember when I get home :)

Yes, that's true. I didn't mention it because it seems that in this case there's simply no alternative to recompression. The technical explanation - MP3 and Vorbis are both, as you say, lossy formats. They compress by throwing stuff away. Each time you compress a file to a lossy format, more stuff gets thrown away. If you edit an MP3 file and resave it, you've now gone through two steps of recompression. If you encode a CD to Vorbis and then convert to MP3, also two steps. If you encode, edit, re-encode, transcode - three steps. And so forth. The more steps, the worse the quality. It's the same effect you get if you have a .jpeg image and keep editing it and resaving as a jpeg - each time you do it, you lose some image detail. If the original poster still has the original lossless source for the music - CDs, or whatever - it would be best to re-compress into MP3 format from those. If not, recompression is the only option, sub-optimal as it is.

It will most likely be somewhere under /mnt - /mnt/win_c , maybe.

NO. BAD BVC. DO NOT recommend Cooker as an update source for stable Mandrake. THIS IS NOT WHAT COOKER IS. Running Cooker packages on stable releases of Mandrake is NOT supported or tested and WILL almost certainly break your system. Currently this is especially true because Cooker has had ABI-incompatible updates to perl and python since 10.1 was finished. Besides, even if the Cooker packages function perfectly, Cooker itself is unstable. That's the point of Cooker. As someone has mentioned, GNOME 2.9 is the unstable development branch and it's still quite early in development. You shouldn't use it day-to-day. GNOME development is done like the kernel - odd is development, even is stable - and there's no 2.10 yet, so 2.6 is really only one version out of date (2.8 is the only stable release since then). The 2.6 in Mandrake 10.1 is very, very good and it's not a good idea to update it unless there's something you honestly *need* in GNOME 2.8. Check the changelogs at gnome.org. If there's something in 2.8 you honestly, genuinely can't live without (i'd be amazed if there is, it wasn't a huge update...), use Goetz Waschk's packages. It's the least-bad option for getting a newer GNOME into Mandrake 10.1, as they're a *stable* release (2.8) and they're actually built against 10.1, not Cooker. Those are here: http://wwwra.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~wa.../gnome2.7/RPMS/

it's a console app, so it should print a usage if you just run it from a console with no arguments. I'm on a Windows machine now (work...) so I can't check directly, but from the source code (isn't source code great?!) the usage appears to be simply: ogg2mp3 file.ogg That will create file.mp3 in the same directory.

a13x: I've got the same issue on Cooker, actually, now that you mention it. If you file a bug I'll vote for it. I've also noticed it doesn't *always* go to ~/.trash, which is mucho irritating. Sometimes if I delete something off my /data partition, which is a separate partition formatted ReiserFS, it will sometimes wind up in /data/J.Random.Directory/.trash . Which is a pain, as you can imagine.

I'm not assuming he's in the UK, I was just giving an example from experience :). Here in Canada, I'm on cable. I agree that a proper hardware router is the most technically pleasing setup, though - it's what I use too.

hotplug should definitely be on. the harddrake *service* doesn't need to be on, though.

sorry, I'm fresh outta ideas :\. Only thing I can think of is it's running some kinda hardware probe your system doesn't like. Any output in dmesg?