adamw

mouse: because cooker now has binary-incompatible updates to perl and python. If you try and install GNOME from current Cooker on a 10.1 system you may either find it doesn't work or that the perl interdependencies make you upgrade a lot more stuff than you were expecting... if you absolutely MUST have 2.8 on 10.1, http://wwwra.informatik.uni-rostock.de/~wa.../gnome2.7/RPMS/ is probably the way to go. Set it up as an urpmi repository for a clean MDK 10.1 and do a urpmi --auto-select. But to be honest, why not just use GNOME 2.6? It's not unclean. It works.

yes...since 2.0, the point of GNOME has been to create a desktop that is intended to 'just work', while KDE favours the approach of allowing the power user to set the desktop up the way he/she likes (even when it requires fifteen pages of config options to do so :>). I'm really not sure what veedub meant by scripting, I don't script *anything* on my GNOME desktop...

Hmm...it's probably a bug if libao needs a config file to work correctly and doesn't generate one on install. Let me check that out. Thanks for pointing it out...

mcc is the Mandrake Control Centre, which you should have. However, installing Mandrake from one CD is generally a bad idea, you will be missing a lot of stuff and will have trouble installing it in the future. It might be an idea to install a newer version of Mandrake and use two or three CDs...that way you'll get a nice up-to-date version of gaim included, too. :)

iphitus: actually, Netscape wasn't around 'before any other browser'. That would be Mosaic, which formed the foundation for both Netscape and Internet Explorer. I used it. In fact, the only significant changes to my browsing habits since Mosaic have been the back button, tabs, and RSS feeds. :)

iphitus: there's MandrakeClub packages for flash and java. Mandrake doesn't provide non-free software in its free repositories, as a matter of policy (it's not that it's 'worse' at providing packages than arch, it's a philosophy issue, MDK believe the free version of Mandrake should be 100% free software). BTW, I found that Firefox's automatic-plugin-downloader-thingy worked fine for me, so I didn't need any packages for flash at all (I already had java installed).

That's not really what he means; he means the feel of interacting with an actual rack of CDs, sideways labels and head-rotation and everything. As someone with 650 CDs on shelves, I know exactly what he means, though I get by with Rhythmbox. There's something about the CDs themselves that's different...

did you check the errors you were getting when it didn't work? maybe something's messing with the xorg.conf, harddrake or something...

running through the nvidia installer again usually does the trick, too :)

I think the Gatos driver is what you're looking for. it's packaged for Mandrake as gatos, iirc. I haven't checked its status for a long time, though.

lawsonic: nope, it would not. harddrake only deals with *changes* to installed hardware, and it only deals with *static* hardware; basically, stuff on the PCI, AGP or ISA buses, and internal disk drives. Anything you wouldn't want to change without turning your computer off is dealt with by harddrake. Your PCMCIA cards are dealt with separately, by the PCMCIA service, so harddrake doesn't even affect them. In any case, as I said above, harddrake only deals with *changes*. If you turn it off, Mandrake will continue trying to use whatever hardware it was using immediately before you turned it off. If you, say, add a DVD drive or change your graphics card or whatever, MDK won't notice if you have harddrake turned off, and you'll have to fix it all up manually. That's all. harddrake is a convenience tool, it is not vital.

it's an initscripts bug. Run alsactl restore as root after booting. It's a pain, I know...

They're fine results. Looks like you have some nice speedy RAM :)

Actually, you can maintain a perfectly working Mandrake box for a long time without reinstalling and have it completely up to date. I run Cooker on both my machines, I use Cooker RPM sources exclusively, I update them daily and they work fine. My laptop has not had a reinstall since 9.0. You can upgrade between Mandrake versions with urpmi, as well; I've done it from 9.0 to 9.1, 9.1 to 9.2, and 10.0 to 10.1. Ubuntu is hardly new so far as package management goes; it's based on debian, which has had an 'install once, upgrade forever' system for years. With Debian you can usually mix packages from the various repositories (stable, testing, unstable) without *too* many problems; this is because Debian DOES enforce dependencies that are tested to work between repositories. Even so, you can still have trouble, and if you start using *non*-official repositories, you will still break your system. As I explained, you can't rely on this with Mandrake. As I explained, Mandrake development is entirely based around the stable release every six months. Don't like this? Fine, that's your point of view, and maybe you'd be better off running Debian. However, pretending it's not true is only going to cause you trouble. I wasn't suggesting the way Mandrake is is perfect; I was simply explaining that it *is* the way Mandrake is, and that not treating it this way will cause bad consequences. "He retains stability and does not have to reinstall an OS." Frankly, if you update the kernel and X (and I guess he updated his DE as well, as nothing from Red Hat 7 is likely to cut the mustard today), you're already messing with everything that's going to cause your system to be unstable. And you're doing it on your own. Have fun! I never suggested you should reinstall every six months. How you update between versions of Mandrake is entirely up to you, and it certainly doesn't need to involve reinstalling. Indeed, contrary to your assertion, Mandrake is getting *better* in this regard - since 10.0, much more attention has been paid to testing the DrakX 'update' option and the functionality of updating between versions using urpmi (prior to 10.0, it was a bit of a nightmare, albeit possible). I simply suggested that, for very good and incontrovertible reasons, mixing packages from different releases of Mandrake is a very good way to cause massive system problems.

Yes, yes, no. Go here: http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ . Follow the instructions to add sources for main, contrib and plf sources - ignore the others. Make sure you set the Mandrake version to 10.1 Official. Pick mirrors close to you geographically. Run the commands it produces. If you have problems, try another mirror - some don't work too well. Once you have the sources set up, run this command: urpmi --auto-select -v Once it finishes, do: urpmi kernel-2.6 Then reboot, and you're done. :)

The Apples are nice systems, for sure. The only bad thing I've heard about OS X is it needs piles of RAM. The only other caveat is I wouldn't buy a modern Apple laptop and expect to have Linux run on it at all usefully; support for many things in G5-class Apple laptops is currently broken in Linux, and PPC Linux is just generally a little worse all around than x86. If you go Apple, stay OS X. My favourite line of laptops is a little left-field, but worth checking out if you like to turn heads ;). I own a four year old Sony Vaio C1XD which still regularly draws an impressed crowd whenever I whip it out in public (matron!) It's from Sony's venerable Picturebook line of extremely, extremely small notebooks; it's about half the size of a 12" Powerbook. It uses a widescreen format and is basically the size of its keyboard. (This also makes it great for watching widescreen movies - you get the same screen space you'd get on a much bigger classically-shaped laptop). It's wonderfully supported under Linux and I've loved it ever since I got it; the difference is size is really significant and makes it much less hassle to carry around than any square laptop I've ever used. Unfortunately, Sony no longer makes the Picturebook form factor. The last version released in the series was a fairly powerful machine with a 900MHz (I think) Crusoe CPU, big hard drive, 256MB RAM, Bluetooth and stuff. Mine is a P2/400(!) with 128MB of RAM (upgraded from 64MB) and I still find it perfectly fine to run XFce, so for basic desktop stuff the last made Picturebook would work great. Beyond that, a few other manufacturers (I think JVC, Fujitsu and a start-up with a very nice looking system called the Flybook) make similar systems. Sony's spiritual successor was the TR line which has in turn been succeeded by the T line; both are slightly larger, based on 10.4" widescreens as opposed to 8.9" in the Picturebook. This allows them to include an internal optical drive. They are Centrino-based systems with fast Pentium M processors and you can get them with oodles of RAM (up to 512MB). They cost a pretty penny new, but they do turn up on eBay. I've used a TR3, briefly, and loved it; I wish I could afford one. A couple of other points that were mentioned - as far as Linux support goes the CPU doesn't matter at all, Linux will play happily with any CPU in a current laptop. I agree with those who say Centrino is better than AMD in the laptop arena; I love AMD on the desktop, but in laptops - especially thin and light laptops - the Centrino platform just kills it. The Pentium-M is blazing fast and very, very light on power consumption. Mandrake does indeed include the ipw2100 and ipw2200 drivers for Centrino wireless, and they're confirmed to work in 10.1. If you download a free version of Mandrake you'll need to provide the firmware for the driver, as Intel refuses to release it under a free license. I think commercial versions may include the firmware, but I'm not sure. You can get the firmware from various websites or from your Windows driver CD. HTH!

It's definitely recommended to use PLF RPMs, not random ones found on other sites. PLF RPMs are built on proper Mandrake buildhosts and are thus guaranteed to work properly with Mandrake systems. Plus there's lots of other goodies in plf - check out the win32-codecs package, for starters :)

BTW, there's nothing a host OS could do for an opto-mechanical (i.e., classic ball) mouse. As the name implies, they're mechanical devices; they work by actually measuring the movement of something physical, the ball. I suppose you could offload processing of the images from an optical mouse to the host OS, but I don't know of any optical mouse that actually *does* this, it's obviously trivial enough that doing so wouldn't be a cost benefit. So I doubt there's such a thing as a WinMouse :).

john: if it worked under 2.4 kernel and not under 2.6, though, that's a genuine regression that should be tested. Has anyone tried one of these mice under 10.1? Same problem? If so, could they file a Bugzilla report and have everyone who experiences the same problem vote for it?

Google says it's a good old Orinoco card, which should work fine with no issues using the orinoco drivers. Drakconnect will probably even detect it. Have you tried it? Are you having problems?

agreed with aussiejohn; i generally back my whole /home up somewhere else, do a completely fresh install, and just copy stuff back as it's needed (if I install something and I realise I had a bunch of configuration from my previous install I just copy it back). Saves the problems that can occasionally be caused when apps stop being backwards compatible with old config files.

Yes, the nvidia chipset drivers are more or less entirely obsolete now. You don't need the network driver and you don't need the sound driver. FWIW, I use the ALSA driver on my nforce2-based machine, snd-intel8x0. You may like it more than i810_audio, so give it a shot :). You can switch with draksound. I find I can get perfect 5.1 audio out of it, but *only* with the exact right mixer settings and if I tell apps to use OSS output (not native ALSA output). Sigh, sound on Linux is still a bit of a black art sometimes. Haven't tried recording stuff so I don't know if it's full duplex or not.

X is very integral to a Mandrake system. Sure from *one* perspective it's 'just another package', but everything GUI in a Linux system relies on X in some way, so switching it out for an unsupported version is rather different from switching out gaim, or something. Sure, you CAN use new kernels and x.org and KDE and GNOME and whatever else you like on old versions of Mandrake. If you want to experiment and use up-to-date packages, why don't you just use a newer version of Mandrake? That way you get x.org and kernel 2.6.8 packages *built with* and *tested to work with* the rest of the system, and supported by Mandrake. Isn't that just a heck of a lot more sensible? "A guy I used to work with had a box running Red Hat 7 until a few months ago - he used Xorg and kernel 2.6.7 - I guess that was pretty dumb, huh?" Frankly, yes. Don't tell me he didn't have problems with that setup, because I won't believe you. And what in the heck did he gain over just running Fedora Core? If you use urpmi to get x.org you will obviously need to use a source with x.org in it. This means a 10.1 or Cooker source. Using a 10.1 or Cooker source on a 9.2 system WILL BREAK IT. This is because Mandrakesoft do not enforce or pretend to enforce full version-based dependencies in Mandrake - i.e., the dependencies are checked to be valid only *within* the version that you are using. Mandrake state and endeavour to ensure that any package in a Mandrake version X repository will have absolutely correct provides and requires with regards to *Mandrake version X* - i.e., if you use urpmi to do anything with the packages in Mandrake version X, they will all play nicely and work with each other. However, the dependencies are *not* guaranteed to be correct for Mandrake versions W, Y or Z. For instance, blah may just depend on libfoo, when it fact what it really needs is libfooX.Y. Within one version of Mandrake this is fine, because you *know* what version of libfoo that version of Mandrake contains, and you *know* that blah has been compiled against it. However, say you're using Mandrake 9.2, and you try to install blah from Mandrake 10.1. It will see that libfoo is present and install happily. However, the version of libfoo you have in Mnadrake 9.2 is NOT libfooX.Y. blah will therefore not work or not work properly. This is fact and is frequently acknowledged by Mandrake developers. This is why, if you are using a mix of packages from different versions and you attempt to report a bug on Bugzilla or get support from Mandrake, it will not be accepted and you will be advised to use one single version of Mandrake. THIS is why I said it was reckless to advise some to 'just use urpmi to get x.org'. The unavoidable inference from that advice is that the user should start mixing Mandrake versions, and the unavoidable consequence of that is *trouble*. Yes, you can work around this trouble yourself, if you're handy at reverting package installs, building stuff from source and hacking config files. No, it is *not* a good idea to suggest this as the 'best' way to proceed to someone asking the question that was asked at the start of this thread. Unless you know better you should assume that someone wants a tested, reliable, working and supported system, and in THAT case the best advice is to USE THE MANDRAKE 9.2 PACKAGES. End of story.

I have a WD 80GB SATA drive on an nforce2 motherboard using Silicon Image ATA controller and it works very well, performance is excellent. I've tried to help hanez with his problem and it looks like he really does have some kind of deep-down hardware/kernel problem, unfortunately :(. But for a lot of setups, it really works great.

you probably have numlock turned on :). on laptop keyboards, turning numlock on usually turns the right-hand end of the keyboard into a numeric keypad. this caught me out once. If you can't turn it off, *that's* a bug :). Mandrake includes a numlock service which messes with the numlock setting on boot; if you can't get numlock to turn off, maybe you need to disable that service. Assuming you can manage it with half of your keys typing numbers :)