Tymestream

Thanks all. Just what I needed a little humor to bring me back to earth. Problem solved...for now. Cheers.

Thanks guys, All very useful suggestions. I always have one spare system running Linux anyway. My vexation at the time prevented me from seeing the obvious option of dual booting. Yet I now have another interesting thing to report. I decided to dual boot and install windows first - but after the Checking system configuration... all I get is a black screen and the windows install will not proceed. Seems like my Linux partition is becoming self-aware and rejecting Windows all together. Yet different Distro's will begin installation progress with no problems. Either way, onwards and upwards. - I will dual boot and with contiuned support from Mandrivausers stay from fully switching back to ... well you know. PS. I know the problem with the windows black screen installation thing is a MBR or partition table issue. It just sounds so much better to suggest that my Linux is becoming self aware... Cheers,

<Rant> Hello all, I am having a crisis of (OS) epic preportions. I have been debating the horrible possibility of switching back to Windows. I know, I know, this is the worst place to post such a thing and perhaps that is why I am posting it here- to have someone tell me how silly it is. I am a University student who has always loved computers, has extensive Linux experience, and does love Linux play-with-it-till-it-works mentality. Yet I find myself unable to spare the time to keep my Linux box running smoothy, after two years of faithful service it is refusing to cooperate with me and causing me no end of configuration trouble. Fonts are silly, Linux is hanging and a host of all heretofore unheard of problems with Linux. All I want is my OS to do what I ask it to do - is that to much to ask? I do like to play games without having to spend time endlessly configuring PointToPlay and I like video editing but KDEnlive just doesn't cut it. I like opensource but it seems that when compiling code, something is always out of date or not the requisite version. Yet as the prompt flashes ominously in front of me asking to format NTFS, I pause... and here I sit (on my windows based laptop) waiting for a response... Temporarilly resisting, Anakin

Thanks for the quick reply. There is a problem with how it is reporting the disk usage. I did enter to failsafe mode and check the space used and it only says 4.8G, that is 1G to spare (not alot but enough for the / partition as you mentioned it is usually only 2 or 3 gigs - I know why mine is larger and that is ok) I am wondering what can be confusing the drive to think that it is full. Hope this makes sense. I am not a linux wizard but I am far from a NOOB so any detailed info that might help is great.

Any idea what this is? I am stumped. Plenty of space available on drive, happened all of a sudden. I am writting a term paper and need by machine. Suggestions? Full error text: The following installation problem was detected while trying to start KDE: Temp directory (/tmp) is out of disk space KDE is unable to start The /tmp directories are NOT out of space, DU -shc returns 4.8G used yet: /dev/sda1 5.8G 5.8G 0 100% / - ?????????????????????? /dev/sda6 140G 89G 52G 64% /home Nothing, anywhere, indicates that this is actually full except for partmon. Cheers,

SOLVED The problem with the shutdown and autologin stemmed from the same thing. The upgrade to 2006 from 10.1, for some reason, did not install KDM (I think that this is the default login manager) Once I urpmi kdm all was well, I now have my pretty login options and my shutdown/restart options. Also the logoff menu from the <start> menu also gives me shutdown/restart options were before it only showed end session. Found a few others with the same problem. Hope this helps someone else. Cheers,

I have never changed from whatever the default is in 10.1. I just upgraded to 2006.0 and I lost the login manager and ability to shutdown or restart. The login manager - so called - is simply a blue screen with 2 white boxes labeled user and password. Ultra basic. The login options in the <KDE - Configure your desktop> have no effect. Very odd.

I installed Mandriva 2006 a few weeks ago as an upgrade to 10.1 OE and everything went excellent. Two problems that I have come to notice are: 1. The login screen is very basic. Blue screen with simple text inputs for user and password. While it is functional it is not what I expected. (This may or may not be connected to the fact that the auto login feature will not work) 2. I have no option to shut down the computer! I can only "end session" (Which takes me back to the simple login screen mentioned above and gives me no other options other than user and password) I have no idea where to begin. If anyone has suggestions I would be grateful.

Though this doesn't directly address the question, I have had great success using WEBMIN for my samba setup. The handy feature about using WEBMIN is that you can optionally view the config files from the samba WEBMIN interface. As root: urpmi webmin It's that simple. Once I got the hang of what was going on I removed Webmin and was on my merry way. My set up is very much like yours - I hope this helps.

Howdy, Mandrake does a great job auto-detecting my removable hard disk. The only problem is that I cannot access it as user, root gets automatic ownership. Making a line in FSTAB does not work. If I try to mount the device as SDA the auto-detect feature will load it as SDB etc... My question is where does mandrake get the default values for the auto-mount feature. If I could change these (or turn it off all together) all would be peachy. Thanks in advance.

Hello, I am trying to make a little feature that will save me a lot of time in the future. As many know the commands in Linux are extensive and I often forget many commands that I learned in the past - only to have to learn them again. I figured a simple tool to avoid this is to make a little .note file under my /home/user/ and make an alias that would dump what I type to it. In other words: At the prompt I want to type the following: note Whereis - command for locating files This would open my editor, input the string and close the file. I can do it now, but all the alias note does is is open emacs /home/user/.note , the rest I have to input and then manually save. I am not a bash expert and I figured this would be easy enough for someone who was. Appreciated.

Found Solution to problem of starting VNC at boot with desired user. Edit: /etc/sysconfig/vncservers and follow directions there. SOLVED

Thanks for the link. I think I am slowly losing my windows defrag mentality. Problem Solved.

I have heard over and over that Linux does not require file system defragmentation - and I understand many reasons why this is so. However, I let a couple of drives file up a little too much and now have a drive that is 24% (or more) non-contigious. Is it my windows mentalitly here or is this not going to have any performance effect? I cannot help but feel that it will effect drive access times. Worse yet, I backed up the data and reformatted the partition and copied data back and it was still fragmented!? I would have thought that rebuilding the filesystem would have solved this issue. Or perhaps there is a more thorough way? Any suggestions would be great. [moved from Software by spinynorman]

I just came upon this message while searching for defraging Linux. I have read and understand what is said about the EXT3 fs, however, after running e2fsck I have a non-contigious data rate of 24 %! Am I to assume that this is not a problem. My windows mentality is telling me it must be a problem- but much like yourself I have been windows free for years, I guess some habits die hard. Any advice? Thanks in advance.