adamw

dragonmage: oh, if you were thinking of installing the 10.1 RPMs on 10.0, don't. Just use the 10.0 RPMs from contrib.

@dragonmage: I'm not quite sure what you mean by special, but there's nothing unusual about its dependencies. It depends on the stuff you'd expect it to, image transformation libs and gtk+, and obviously it depends on the versions that are in 10.1. Just install gimp via urpmi or whatever... @mikeymike: they're in contrib; set up a source with easyURPMI and install gimp2.0, or gimp-2.0, or gimp2-0, or something. it's called one of those things. or something very like it. shouldn't be hard to find. :)

also, which Mandrake are you using? If you're using 10.0 Official, try 10.1 Community. And, in fact, vice versa.

usually, it's frozen for final release for a few days, then all the devs go on holiday for a week or so (gotta love French work philosophy...I'm jealous as hell ;>), then they get back and start throwing new stuff at Cooker. hehe.

sellis: you could always change 791 to something else - try 788 for 800x600 and see if that works, or if it doesn't, just set it to 'none' for text mode boot...

izxthusdan: on a technical note, Mandrake does the same thing, though on a much smaller scale. The DM service, which starts the desktop, isn't in fact the last service to load during boot. Before I think 9.0 or 9.1 (don't remember which), the DE was only started after *everything* else; DE startup was made into a service and put higher in the boot order to improve apparent boot times, exactly the same tactic XP uses. To be honest, I've always found XP boots a little faster than MDK too. It's hard to tell since XP doesn't give you any feedback on what it's DOING while booting, but it does seem to have a more efficient init sequence than any Linux distro. This isn't terribly hard, as Linux init is rather antiquated and in need of an overhaul. There are a few projects aiming to "parallelize" bootup - allowing services to start at the same time as each other where this is possible without causing problems, instead of everything lloading in strict sequence and waiting for the previous thing to finish. It's rather a complicated task to manage, though, so it will be fairly tricky to roll into the distro. But I expect it'll happen within the next few revisions.

the middle two are definitely being done. I don't know about the pm.h problem but I really hope it's going to be dealt with. Not sure if there'll be a workaround for the kdm problem either.

a note to aussiejohn - mdk's official development language is English. It's not developed in French and translated to English; it's developed in English, and French is actually a translation / localisation effort like any other. That said, since many of the developers are French, some of the descriptions and so forth can look a trifle "translated". I occasionally write better descriptions for particularly guilty packages but I really need to have a more systematic effort at this (I hope some people notice that the description for urpmi in 10.1 OE is a lot better than it has been up till now).

you can do it all manually too, of course. try it, it's fun :). look in /etc/acpi/events and /etc/acpi/scripts (i think...I'm not in front of a Linux box right now). basically you can put little scripts in events which will get run when certain events happen - power cord plugged / unplugged, power button pressed, lid closed - and in turn will call a bigger script to actually do stuff. This is a brilliantly flexible system that lets you do all sorts of stuff. When I unplug my laptop the CPU throttles down to 3/4 full speed, the backlight is set to its dimmest level, and my hard disk is set to spin down after 30 seconds of no activity (instead of the default 15 mins or so). I can try and post more detailed info later, but you can work it all out yourself with a little hacking about and some google skills :). Start off at http://acpi.sourceforge.net/ .

Looking around on the site I see no mention of WPA support. The 2100 site *does* mention WPA support quite prominently, so I'm thinking maybe the driver doesn't actually support WPA yet :(

oh, and for reference, I was using a yum-cha USB bt adapter bought blind from eBay, and a Nokia 3650 phone.

go to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org/ , set your version to 10.0CE, and set up media for "main" and "contrib". These media are updated on a rolling basis and contain security updates. From the command line, urpmi --auto-select -v will install all available updates. (Before doing this, do urpmi.update -a to update your local copy of the list of all the files on the remote server). Alternatively, you could set your version to 10.0OE, define media for "main", "contribs" and an update source, and use MandrakeUpdate to get updates; then you'd be running a normal copy of 10.0OE, more or less.

how is the primary 40GB drive set up? is it one big partition or several small ones? if it's several small ones, you'll want to split the 40GB backup partition up to match it exactly. then the command to run is simply: dd /dev/hdXX /dev/hdXX where the first device is the one that matches the partition you wish to backup, and the second is the one that matches the partition which will be the backup. There are options for dd that can be tweaked to improve its speed, as well, I think.

hotplug calls the scripts in /etc/dynamic directly, IIRC.

irda is a nightmare to make work under linux; forget it is my advice, bluetooth is much better and easier to get working. I have had bluetooth working, but I can't remember all the steps for the life of me. I can give some pointers, though. First fire up rpmdrake and make sure every package with bluez in the name is installed. The tools you will need to use include hciconfig and rfcomm. The best thing to do is look at the main bluetooth-on-linux project page, http://www.bluez.org/ , and also do some googling on the theme of "name of your phone" "bluetooth", and "linux". Hopefully you'll find someone who's done it before, which will make your life much easier. Make sure to modify any instructions you find where appropriate, though - in particular, a lot will direct you to compile software and libraries from scratch which may well be packaged for Mandrake already, in which case just install the packaged versions and skip the compile / install instructions. good luck! if you come up with any specific problems let me know and I'll try and remember anything I can that will help... (i managed to get a state where I could send and receive files from and to the phone, and use it as a GPRS modem. so it's possible :>)

looks like a neat frontend :). 0.87 came out this morning, have to try it out when I get home... btw, do you know if there's an easier way to set up controls generally than editing them for each game at a time? it's kind of a drag to go into every single game and set the joypads up correctly...

It could well simply be down to hard disk speeds. Booting up in particular is very heavy on the hard disk and not so heavy on anything else; laptop hard disks are generally a *lot* slower than desktops which could account for the difference on its own. I would bet that if you were to try encoding some audio files, or editing some large image files, the laptop would outperform the desktop.

it could well be some kind of bug with udev and RAID, though it's hard to be sure without more info. What happens if you try and use udev instead of devfs on the updated 10.1? To test, make sure the udev package is installed and then make a *separate* boot menu entry identical to the one you currently use but without the bit that says "devfs=mount", then try booting from that option. (Don't replace your current entry, in case the new one doesn't work!)

driggins: exactly what tasks are your end users likely to be performing (in the most ideal case) in Linux, apart from email use? Try and think of *everything*. This will make it easier to evaluate the choice - as the above indicates, pretty much any distro would fit the scenario you've given so far, once it had been correctly configured by a good admin. Every distro has Evolution, and to be honest it doesn't matter so much whether you choose KDE or GNOME to run underneath it, it probably comes down to your own personal choice.

yep, I do something very similar to gowator when doing a clean install, I do it completely clean and copy across old configs as they actually become needed. If you back up /etc, you will need to replace kdmrc (it lives under /etc somewhere, probably /etc/kdm or /etc/kde/kdm or something like that) with the 10.1 version after restoring your old tree, or else the login will be broken (assuming you use the default login manager).

@darkelve: heck, open your mind, my three favourite games ever are Doom (FPS shooter), TIE Fighter (story-heavy space sim), and Grim Fandango (LucasArts point-n-click adventure). They're all great, in different ways. Games have the potential to be far more scary than movies, as well, as you have control and the outcome isn't predetermined. I found Doom a lot more scary to play through for the first time than any movie I've ever seen, it's a much more immediate experience.

the nv driver allegedly supports tv-out, but I've never had any success. Using the nvidia driver works perfectly, however. I don't know how good the above tool is - if it works, great, if not, just read the NVIDIA documentation *carefully* and follow it to the letter and you'll be fine.

You might like to try disabling the nice graphical boot; it'll be a little uglier but it's more informative and might possibly cure the shutdown problem. You can do that from the drakboot tool. and kmc77, Naruto rocks. he's attached to my cellphone, too. :)

you could also just install kernel-multimedia-2.6, which has a working lirc build.

the latest information *costs*. an hour or so old is free, though. :)