adamw

For the record, I ran into this same problem myself when testing Miro (which tries to use ImageMagick to do something like the above). The fundamental problem is that the mpeg2encode application is not free. It's very old reference code provided by the MPEG group, but it is not under a free license, so I can't package it and have ImageMagick depend on it. I filed a bug with the ImageMagick folks about the issue - I haven't checked on its status in a while, I will do that. Actually, I can't find it. Hmm. Wonder where the hell I discussed this. Oh well. I'll do it again.

FWIW, I seem to have the same problem. I wanted to use a VBox install to test my Windows Mobile sync stuff in a clean environment, but it doesn't want to work. :\ I haven't tested yet whether it works if I boot with the device plugged in. I don't get any error messages, but the guest just never sees the device...

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Beta 1 'thornicrofti'. This beta includes the newest release of KDE 4, KDE 4.1 final, GNOME 2.23.5, Firefox 3, and kernel 2.6.26 final. The new beta also switches to using splashy (rather than bootsplash) for boot and shutdown graphics, and adds synchronization support for Windows Mobile 2003 devices. As always, we remind you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, we strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla.

2009 Beta 1 (coming out in a few hours) includes KDE 4.1 final. (And amaroK, FWIW).

And to answer the bit of your question not noted there - installers are specific to the distribution and version. A Mandriva installer won't install Ubuntu. A Mandriva 2008 installer won't install Mandriva 2008 Spring. An Ubuntu 8.04 installer won't install Ubuntu 7.10. So for Ubuntu you'd need to find their documentation for hard disk installation methods. Also you might want to note that on the page jkerr links to there's a USB-based installation option, which may be useful to you too.

It's half done, but I can't finish it due to a bug in the buildsystem which no-one seems to want to fix :\

Have you tried simply using drakconnect? It is able to cope with several cellular data devices and providers.

For official events we do still provide promotional materials (CDs, stickers etc) for free to groups that are organizing a party - you should mail lugs AT mandriva DOT com with details (the organization you represent, some info about the event you're organizing, and a physical address to mail the materials to). If you've done this and not received a reply, please email me and I'll sort it out. In general if you're putting on some kind of proper installfest, you can contact lugs@ and get some stuff mailed to you. The sale of One CDs on the Store is simply because quite a lot of people asked us to do it. It's meant to be for more informal situations - people who like to give out CDs to friends and family, for instance, but want nice pre-printed ones. The price just covers the cost of duplication and distribution, which isn't cheap. Unfortunately we're nowhere near rich enough to simply absorb these costs as Canonical does for the Ubuntu ShipIt program.

Yep - it's based on the Chinese Loongson CPU, which is based on MIPS. Info from the manufacturer here: http://www.st.com/stonline/products/literature/bd/13577.htm This site: http://www.emtec-australia.com.au/products...m_empc_89/123/1 lists it at AU$580, which compares quite well to the Aspire One and Eee.

Mandriva is proud to announce the release of Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring Alpha 2, marking the first public pre-release of the upcoming Mandriva Linux 2009. This alpha introduces several significant changes, most obviously the inclusion of KDE 4 - 4.1 beta 2, specifically - as the default version of KDE, and the latest development version of GNOME, 2.23.4. The kernel has also been updated to release 2.6.26rc7. We emphasize that the KDE change is a major one that is not yet entirely completed and likely to cause many bugs. As always - but more importantly than ever - we remind you not to use pre-releases in any critical situation; install them only on a test system or partition, or in a virtual machine. Additionally, we strongly discourage using this pre-release to upgrade from any earlier release of Mandriva Linux, as the transition process from KDE 3 to KDE 4 is not yet fully implemented and you are likely to end up with an unusable system. Another feature of interest to many users will be the addition of orphan package tracking (and optional automatic removal) to the urpmi package manager. Of course, many applications have been updated (although the default version of Mozilla Firefox is still currently 2.0.x), and most of the distribution has been rebuilt with a new GCC version, 4.3. Please make sure to read the Errata and Release Notes, and file any bugs not covered in those pages on Bugzilla.

The change was done upstream in e2fsprogs. The reason is that ext4 will need minimum 256-byte inodes. If you have an ext3 partition with 256-byte inodes it will be possible to convert it into an ext4 partition without data loss (as you can do between ext2 and ext3), but it won't be possible to convert ext3 partitions with inodes smaller than 256 bytes into ext4 partitions.

Well, seems I'm allowed to talk about this now... http://www.gdium.com is our current project. It's a netbook (or whatever you want to call it) which runs a customized Mandriva Flash. Interesting technical note is that it uses the Loongson CPU, which is not x86-compatible, so we ported Mandriva entirely to a new architecture for this project. It's a pretty normal netbook in most ways, but it has no internal storage: everything's on the 'G-Key', which is basically a Flash. Some people see this as a drawback but I think it's neat - it's great for security (just keep the key with you and only plug it in when you use the machine; even if someone steals the machine, or you lose it, there's absolutely nothing on it without the key), and flexible in situations where you would want a pool of machines (family or office, maybe). You just plug the key into any Gdium and go ahead and use it. (It just occurred to me it'd be awesome if we could get big enough keys to be dual - plug it in a Gdium and it boots the Gdium-tailored edition, plug it in a regular PC and it boots normal MDV Flash, and the two share data - but I don't think that'll be possible for a few years. I should suggest it though!) It's coming out in at least Australia later this year. I think it'll also be released in Europe, or at least France. Not sure about elsewhere in the world.

ffi: mostly I follow OSNews, Linux Today, fsdaily.org, Slashdot, The Register and tuxmachines.org to find news. I also follow the distrowatch review list in the sidebar. Periodically I just search news.google.com for Mandriva and see what comes up. It's perfectly safe to build kernels on Mandriva, so long as you copy the source into your home directory and do it there. You can't damage anything else in the building process, and kernels are designed to be installed alongside each other - so you stick your new kernel and initrd in /boot , add it to grub or lilo, and try booting it. If it doesn't work, so what? All your other kernels are still right there on the boot menu. You might be disappointed at the performance, though. Remember that these days the vast majority of drivers in the kernel are built as modules, which means unless the hardware they support is actually present on your system, they'll never be loaded and will never have the slightest impact on performance. Building your own kernel was a more useful idea back in the days - five, six years ago now - when distros provided kernels with lots of the drivers built in statically, so they were loaded all the time and wasted memory even if the hardware they supported wasn't in your machine.

there's no way to do that, that I know of. you have to do it via RB and add the files to the RB library first (which isn't hard).

Historical note: the first third of Eternal was not actually made by TeamTNT. It began as an independent project, and released (IIRC) eight or nine levels in this form. It was then swallowed by TeamTNT, and the last two thirds (again, IIRC, it's a long time ago...) were released under the TeamTNT name and with input from TeamTNT members. There is - to me, anyway - a fairly obvious difference between the styles of the independent section and the TeamTNT section, though both are good. edit: just checked, it was 13 levels created by the initial Team Eternal, not 8. I recall now that my favourite bits of the initial Eternal were done by Sverre Kvernmo, who went on to be a professional designer. I don't know where he is now...

The bug is not in krandr. The 'bug' is in the NVIDIA driver itself. For some obscure reason, it abuses X.org's refresh rate reporting mechanisms when twinview mode is enabled; the first attached display shows up with a refresh rate of 50Hz, the second with 51Hz, and so on. It's not krandr's fault, it's just reporting the figure it gets, as it should. It's the NVIDIA driver that reports bogus figures. In 2008 Spring, BTW, we disable twinview mode by default to avoid this issue, as we used to get *tons* of reports of it. As medo says, it's not really a problem: your monitor *is* using the correct refresh rate.

There are only two drivers that don't come with Free - 'nvidia' and 'fglrx' (the NVIDIA and ATI/AMD proprietary drivers, respectively). That's because they're not Free. :) Neither affects this situation, because this is a fairly old ATI card - cards older than Radeon 9500 are no longer supported by the proprietary driver at all, so we always use the Free driver for these cards (radeon), whether on Free, One or Powerpack. It sounds like there is a definitely a bug in recent versions of the driver with your card. The best thing to do would be to investigate the bug so we can report it to the driver authors. The way to do this is to switch back to the native (but problematic) driver. Then try and start X. Assuming it fails, go to the console - ctrl-alt-F1 - and log in as root. Copy the file /var/log/Xorg.0.log to your home directory (for safekeeping): cp /var/log/Xorg.0.log /home/yourusername Make it owned by your user: chown yourusername.yourusername /home/yourusername/Xorg.0.log now switch back to VESA driver (as described above) and restart X, so you get back to your desktop. Then paste the /home/yourusername/Xorg.0.log file into this thread (or pastebin , or something) so we can look at it. Thanks!

Well, Nautilus isn't Rhythmbox. You have to drag and drop *in Rhythmbox*. Run Rhythmbox, set up your library. You should then be able to drag any song from the library to the iPod *inside Rhythmbox* - it should show your iPod on the sidebar.

Skype if your friends use Skype, otherwise Ekiga, which can interoperate with any other SIP client (there are several free ones for Windows).

As I recall, Kevin's tune *used* to be that Mandriva wouldn't survive because Linspire would beat it... ;)

Rhythmbox should do it. It works for me, though I don't use an iPod. Note that if you're trying to transcode (convert from another format to a format supported by the iPod), you'll need the gstreamer encoding plugin for a format the iPod supports.

However, placing the line in any file in /etc/modprobe.d should also work, as all files in /etc/modprobe.d are sourced by modprobe.conf. In fact it's 'more correct' to create a new file in /etc/modprobe.d than the edit modprobe.conf , these days. It suggests to me that maybe the line *is* being read but the module is loaded anyway - not sure why that might be. An alternative approach to the problem is to use index lines: options snd-usb-audio index=0 options snd-hda-intel index=1 that should make the USB device into device 0, the default device, rather than your onboard sound being the default device.

No update has been issued for urpmi for 2008 Spring. All updates released are announced on the security-announce mailing list, so all you have to do is check the archives there. Changelog mailing list archive shows that no urpmi package has ever been sent to 2008.1 /main/testing or /main/backports , either.

jkerr: you're right indeed, the hdlist is still built. I stand corrected. as you say, I think it's just there for legacy purposes. There's no particular need to use it on 2008 Spring.

I don't think that's the case, or far more people would be reporting the same problem you had. As far as I've seen, you're the only one. The problem with the synthesis.hdlist file for 2008 Spring was different, genuine, and has been corrected: I tested this. Yesterday I could not add a 2008 Spring main repository due to the reported md5sum error, today I can. I have not changed anything about urpmi. Whatever you're experiencing is different and apparently unique to you. :) I suspect by removing and reinstalling urpmi you shifted some files in /var/cache/urpmi that were causing the problem. That would be my guess. I don't believe there's anything wrong with urpmi itself.