adamw

cybr: actually, in the case of my objections I don't think I need to test it, because even if it does what it says on the tin *perfectly* you still end up using packages from multiple untested-against-each-other sources :). I agree that this thing would be most useful on Fedora, but then having to use multiple untested untrusted third party sources for basic functionality is a big reason I don't want to touch Fedora with a barge pole - hence why it's a solution to the wrong problem :)

this is a known Totem bug, actually. It was fixed in Cooker, and myself and some others urged for the updated package to be backported to 10.1 updates, but I'm not sure if it has been yet. When I was suffering under it, Neil, I used the same workaround as you. You're not going to be able to fix it unless a 10.1 update package is released, or you feel comfortable rebuilding the Cooker .src.rpm, unfortunately.

ir? eesh, good luck. I *once* got *one* file transferred to my old phone over a wireless link in Mandrake. It worked using the same procedure i'd previously tried 50 times with no luck. I tried again 100 times afterwards...no luck. Buy yourself a Bluetooth dongle! I got one yesterday for my new cellphone. Plug the dongle in, type gnome-obex-send file.jpg , click the name of my phone in the box that pops up, type in the pin code on the phone, and the file transfers. beautiful. :)

gaim is the other big one. I use it and rarely have trouble.

You're trying to install entirely the wrong thing :). Go to the 'start' menu, then configuration, system, packaging, Install Software. Search for 'gaim'. Tick the box, and hit install. Mandrake will ask for the installation CDs (make sure you have 'em handy) and install gaim for you.

there was another very recent post with the same issue yesterday; udev ain't creating the device when it should. The poster in that thread found a way around it; I think he created the device manually with an mknod command. You'd have to do that every time you booted, though.

Yes, you can. Running GNOME or KDE it'll be a little slow. You might want to look at xfce, instead, it's packaged in Mandrake. AFAIK, Mandrake plays fine with iPods. I don't have one, but I've read reports that it works.

well, 'drakconf' is the command that brings up the GUI. It would be helpful if you could try running that and see if you get any useful errors before it freezes.

You might want to try ide=nodma kernel parameter, too. I had a similar problem when I first installed 10.1CE, and it *wasn't* media - I had my RAM overclocked too far :). So random hardware issues can also be a factor here.

heh, my first cat was called isadora...anyway, don't know what's causing the initrd problem, but the post at the top of this page - no, you don't need to worry, both those messages are perfectly normal. Linux has the ability to load a custom DSDT table if you put it into the initrd - this is for laptops whose installed DSDT is excessively broken, you can fix problems with them by building a custom DSDT into the initrd. For 99% of systems you don't need to do that, hence the message is nothing at all to worry about.

yeah, I saw a comment on an osnews thread recently where the poster had a problem with drakfirsttime hanging at startup. It doesn't affect *everyone*, but it's interesting that it affects a few people. As I said the process is called drakfirsttime, try switching to a console and killing it. There's an option in I think /etc/sysconfig somewhere to tell it not to run on startup.

arctic: the fc guys have been doing some good work on boot times lately and they found the bottlenecks on fc are less to do with services than you'd think. Someone over on the FC mailing lists came up with a very neat program which runs during the boot process and gives exact timings and hard disk usage statistics throughout the boot process, and also wrote a neat a java app which gives you a lovely easy to read graph of the results. They found that on FC there were a couple of FC-specific things causing *major* slowdown, and they're working on that now. Several of us cheerfully nicked this whole thing and ran it on Mandrake Cooker, and the results have been discussed on the cooker ML. Currently we've discovered that udev (and the way the initscripts work with it) is causing several slowdowns in the boot process, and there's work ongoing to speed it up. There's also been a proposal to replace bash with dash (a lighter, faster shell) for running the startup process, but there's a problem with that in that some of our startup scripts have bash-specific stuff in them.

I don't really like this thing. Quote from the message: "The new Smart package manager is able to let you use different repositories that were not designed to work together. Which was a recurring complaint on this and many other mailinglists." In other words, this is a solution to a problem no-one should *try* and solve; using multiple incompatible non-official package sources to update their distribution. No matter how good the dependency resolution, in my experience, this can only lead to pain and a broken machine. OK, on some distributions, it's hard to avoid...but even then, this thing might keep you staggering along for a little bit longer, but in the end the discrepancies between the sources are still probably going to come back and bite you.

...and this, kids, is why you shouldn't mix Mandrake version sources.

banjo: you probably don't have the wx -devel libraries installed...run rpmdrake, search for 'wx', and install anything with -devel in the name.

arctic: looks to me like it's looking for default config files that may or may not exist and just warning when they aren't there. dcgui-qt: symbol lookup error: dcgui-qt: undefined symbol: _ZN10CHubSearchC2Ev is the vital error that actually stops it working. I think your suggestion of the libs being incompatible is correct regardless, but it's not the config files that are the problem :)

inflexion: believe me, if there was a way to tattoo knowledge of urpmi into every new user's brain, we'd love it. it'd save so many people from screwing up their system. if you hang around here long enough you'll see links to easyurpmi being posted on a daily basis :D

oh, after you say 'yes', your fonts will look a little different next time you log out and in again. hopefully you'll like them better. if you don't, then go to easy urpmi - http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ - follow the instructions to set up a PLF source matching your version of mandrake, and do 'urpmi libfreetype6'. it'll put your freetype and freetype-devel packages back to the plf version, as you had before. Like I said above, to me the mdk freetype now looks a lot better, but fonts are so subjective I thought I'd mention this in case you like the plf look more.

that'd be a yes. Dunno where you got plf freetype (and why it can't find a plf -devel package to go with it), but anyway, there's no need to use plf freetype any more. Historically there was a patent issue which meant the plf version would give you better looking fonts, but recently I've found the non-patent-encumbered freetype (the -mdk rather than -plf) gives *better* output. I actually have my urpmi specifically setup *not* to install the plf freetype :). Short answer - that's a "yes".

yep, that's who mine was aimed at. Probably wouldn't do anything to help oms's problem. That one's got me stumped, I'm afraid.

the nvidia problem was a kernel change which removed something in a header file, some power management variable name AFAIK (they'd previously been tagged obsolescent, so it was nvidia's fault for still expecting them to be there...) I don't know if ATI's problem is the same, but if it is, the same fix would work. Google for nvidia and pm.h and maybe kernel 2.6.8 or something and you should find some references to the fix, I no longer remember the details.

...and no, there's no way to make Mandrake smaller without a considerable amount of work on your part. The minimal install basically works by defining the packages necessary for a functioning Mandrake system and installing them all plus their dependencies. To make it smaller you'd probably have to start rebuilding core packages not to pull in so many dependencies, and that's a pile of work.

I'm not sure you can make any other mainstream distro smaller than Mandrake, though. Anyone know what Fedora's minimum install size is? Does it include yum?

aru: good stuff, thanks.

I must be lucky with media...I always buy the cheapest rubbish I can, and rarely have trouble. I've got bootlegs (as in live concert recordings made from the audience) burned onto Super Cheapo (disclaimer: not a real brand) media which don't even have a *label* to protect them that were burned three or four years ago and they still work fine. And I've had super-expensive brand-name disks fail to burn properly right out of the box. *shrug*...hard to say, really. Best advice - anything you want to make sure of, burn three copies! The discs are cheap enough.