adamw

sounds to me like this 'new version of kaffeine' has messed up kde, and the upgrade reinstall has left the broken packages alone. Where did you try to install kaffeine from, and do you know what other packages you installed?

BTW, have you tested the drive to make sure it really is abnormally slow? A quick test that's good enough for ballpark figures is: # hdparm -Tt /dev/hdX (where hdX is the device for the drive you want to test). Cache reads depend on your memory speed and can vary a lot, should be anywhere from 300 up to 800. Disk reads are the important thing, these should be somewhere in the 40-70 range. Anything a lot lower than that means you do have some kind of speed problem.

I also don't know a specific issue, but I do know a general one - the lirc in the main Mandrake kernel is apparently broken. Try using kernel-multimedia-2.6 from a contrib source; Svetljo says the lirc in that kernel works.

yeah, I think for an ugly hack you could just edit q3's config file directly and tell it to use a higher resolution instead. Problem succesfully hidden, sir, bodge factor 9! :)

If you want to edit menus it's probably best to pick KDE's menu system (whether you use the MDK menu system or the DE's original system is an option in menudrake). The mdk menu system doesn't really like to be edited. This should all be a distant bad memory quite soon, once the freedesktop.org menu standard is properly adopted by everyone MDK will move to it. The devs hate the current menu system too, they can't wait to move. :)

micro: that page is badly out of date. ide-scsi isn't needed under kernel 2.6, it burns to IDE devices directly.

There are security updates for CE, in a sense. Security fixes for CE aren't put in a separate Updates tree, they get put directly into the main directory on the mirrors. So long as you have a working Internet source for 10.1CE main, and you run urpmi.update -a and urpmi --auto-select every few days, you'll get updates. arctic - the MandrakeUpdate tool automatically updates the hdlist for the source marked as an updates source. So long as you update using that, you don't need to do it separately.

lindyh: Go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ and follow through the steps there. Make sure you pick the exact version of Mandrake you are using, and click the tick-boxes for main, contrib and plf. Run the commands it gives you. From now on urpmi or rpmdrake (the graphical software installer) should be able to find all dependencies you need. Downloading RPMs manually should never be necessary, even with the 10.1CE CDs problem.

A quick answer to the actual question - a typical RPM will install some executable files in /usr/bin , some libraries in /usr/lib , and some configuration files in /etc . Documentation will go into /usr/share/doc . You should never change these destinations, although theoretically you can. Linux installation isn't much like Windows installation at all - there are standards for where things go and it is almost universally better to let Linux handle this for you. You look after your own data, which you will always store in your home directory, and the system will look after program files and libraries. The only system directory you should ever really mess with directly is /etc , where systemwide configuration goes.

soulse: actually, it should be this: $ ./configure $ make $ su # make install Only the make install needs to be run as root. Everything else should be do in your home dir as yourself, for safety's sake. The output suggests that the make process was successful, so what do you mean by 'doesn't work'? Bear in mind that make only builds the software, it doesn't install it. You can't just type 'gentoo' after running 'make'. You can find the binary that was built and run it - often, it'll be in the directory where you issued 'make', so in that case you can just do './gentoo' - or you can become root and do 'make install', which will install it system-wide and should let you run it with a simple 'gentoo'.

I believe the web browsers in MDK 10.1 AMD64 are compiled 32-bit so you can use 32-bit plugins, aren't they?

Could you give us some more details? "It won't start X" is a bit too vague to troubleshoot :). /var/log/xorg.0.log would be helpful, for a start, and also possibly dmesg. I very much doubt your network hostname has much to do with it (FWIW, when there's no domain or anything, I just use .local.net).

There's no special SATA kernel, SATA will work on any of the kernels MDK ships (and I just noticed recently it sure ships a heck of a *lot* these days :>).

There's a version of 10.1 for PPC recently released; maybe that will work?

Yes, those two firmware file names indicate an acx100 card. The bad news is these are very poor cards for Linux...the acx100 driver works for some setups and some cards but not all. Read all the documentation and experiment, but I had one of these cards for a week and never did get it working (ultimately I got the module loaded and firmware uploaded to the card and it would read the signal from my AP, but could somehow never connect to it). Using ndiswrapper, with any Windows driver I could find for the card, locked the kernel solid. Fun stuff. I replaced the card, in the end. My new one works OK with ndiswrapper.

Most USB stuff in Linux works very well - printers, pen drives, mice, anything like that is fine. USB ADSL modems work badly because they're poorly documented devices which offload lots of work onto the host system, not because they're USB per se...

With the card inserted could you run these two commands: cardctl info cardctl status both as root, and paste the info? thanks.

I agree with John, that fstab line looks odd. Wonder how it got there. There's no reason it should be trying to mount the drive rw (it's a read-only drive, and even with CD writers you don't *mount* them rw, cos you don't write to the mounted volume), or with a weird umask. Let us know if what he suggested helps.

I use an SMC router here and it works great.

it doesn't NOW, though. j'accuse! ;)

yep, agree entirely - there are some things that just work better in hardware, and talking to your ISP is one of them :). get a router, save the hassle.

iphitus: darkelve asked for suggestions for a *Vorbis* player. ipod doesn't do Vorbis.

dave: there's no official public answer to that - it ought to be quite soon, as the boxed sets started shipped yesterday, and it's around a month since it went out to the club. BTW, it's only the ISOs that aren't currently publicly available, there's nothing at all to stop you doing an FTP install.

it was a change in the upstream kernel, they just decided to start calling SATA disks sd* instead of hd*. As I said, I think the most likely issue here is some kind of problem with the version of the kernel module for your SATA controller in the 10.1 kernel. So long as you're happy it's good :) Also, just a note - SATA and ATA aren't the same thing. ATA and IDE both generally refer to the old parallel ATA hard disks, the ones with big fat ribbon cables connecting them to the motherboard. SATA is Serial ATA, the shiny new drive standard which uses sleek, thin, normally red cables. SATA theoretically also gives a speed boost over old parallel ATA but it's not something you're likely to see in usual operation, unless you've got a pair of WD Raptor hard disks.

I've got my Linux desktop on my wireless network, using an internal PCI card. It wasn't pretty, and it's still not perfect (it uses ndiswrapper, whereas I'd prefer a proper native free driver). It took a week of hassle and two separate PCI cards, the second of which cost a good CAN$100. After going through all of that, though, I've discovered a far better method, so you don't have to :). What you need is one of these: Linksys wireless gaming adapter (Amazon) Most of the big-name wireless manufacturers make them, and you can buy them reasonably cheap - around the same CAN$100 mark, or lower - in most big electronics stores, usually in the console gaming section. They're sold as gaming adapters, the idea being that you plug your PS2 or Xbox into it to get it online. But there's nothing about them that makes them *only* work with games consoles. In reality they're plain wireless bridges, which will put ANYTHING with an ethernet connection onto a wireless network. They're easy as anything to configure. You take it out of the box, plug it into the power then plug it into a spare Windows PC with a network cable. You run a little utility that comes on a CD with the system and program some preset wireless settings - channel, SSID, encryption key, all that stuff, and a static IP address if you want it - into the device. Mine can handle up to five, so you can move it across networks easily. This is a one-shot; once the settings are in there they stay in there, and you just flick between presets with a big button on the side. The configuration process is now entirely done. The device will lock onto the wireless network and stay there. Now all you need to do is plug anything with an ethernet port into the ethernet port on the bridge, tell it to pull an IP address automatically, and it pops online. So take it over to your desktop PC, plug it into a power outlet and plug it into the PC with an ethernet cable, and restart the network. Thanks to Linux's wired network support being a damn sight better than its wireless network support, you'll probably be online right away. There, wasn't that easier than fighting with dodgy firmware downloads and cryptic dmesg output? Other advantages - the bridge is a small, light little box which connects to the PC via a cheap standard cable you can buy in various lengths. Treat it as an antenna. Find somewhere where the reception is perfect, stick the bridge there, and buy an ethernet cable exactly long enough to stretch from the PC to the bridge. Isn't that better than the crappy little antenna you get with PCI cards that screws onto the back, leaving you trying to get a wireless connection from ground level two inches away from the inside of your PC, a great source of radio frequency pollution? Also, these things are obscenely flexible. Friend come over with his PC and wants to get it online? Don't fight with wireless settings again, assuming it even has a wireless card. Plug it into the bridge! Want to wire every room in your house for ethernet? No problem, buy a job lot and glue them to the walls. They're fantastic. I bought one for my PS2 and only clued into its potential afterwards. I only wish I'd thought about it before buying the PCI card for my desktop...