payasam

If that's what it does in MDV 2006, James, then I'm probably in the clear. Should also explain why it doesn't obey the "start" command.

It's me, Tyme, but in 1951 I hadn't made up my mind about the beard. I've just replaced that dumb kid with a Lady Friend I photographed when she turned 15 some days back. I've been her slave since she was 4 or 5 hours old. Large beard useful: over the years she has wiped chocolatey paws on it.

OK, Daniewicz, so I turn off iptables and rawdevices and try to figure out what the sound card is doing? Thanks.

I don't know whether to laugh or to pull out my beard by the handful. This thing has been messing up both my blood pressure and my blood sugar for weeks. Thanks, spook.

I have Kiosk now, but I cannot figure it out. Its GUI is incomprehensible, as all GUIs are to me. Is there no plain text file somewhere in which I can specify the x and y co-ordinates of the icons on my desktop?

These services are set to start on boot, but I always find them stopped: - iptables (though shorewall is OK) - alsa (though sound is OK) - rawdevices (can't really see any use for the thing) AC 97. Any way to set them right? [edit] Oops, sorry. MDV 2006. [moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

Have you decided, Scarecrow, that poking fun at Blindows is more filling as soul food than helping someone keep his icons from jumping about like fleas on pogo sticks?

Wonder if it's possible to switch -- on the fly, as it were -- to Gnome or Ice. I wouldn't want to back up my data, then re-install Mandriva as well as all my software.

Whatever it is, Arctic, I do not think it is specific to OOo (Solarian) or Netscape Mail (me). Strange things have been happening in 2006 which didn't happen in 10.1.

Strange thing, Solarian. Yesterday the background of Netscape Mail (only the message area) also changed. The browser component stayed OK, as did all my other software, including StarOffice and OpenOffice. I'm Mandriva 2006, KDE 3.4.2.

Scarecrow, under "[Desktop Icons]" I have just "Preview=".

I'll look at the file, Scarecrow, but I wouldn't know what to do. I suspect you wrote "If it is" in place of "If it isn't" -- and the rest of the para is way above my head. How do I delete the file outside KDE and relog in it? Elsewhere, I came across a reference to /usr/share/config/kdeglobals, which was said to have grid spacing specifications. Well, the one on my system didn't have them, which suggests that an earlier version of KDE had been spoken about. I think there *is* messing up of the context menu. In 10.1 I could send an icon to the waste bin, which I never did, or else delete it outright. In 2006, I have to go into a terminal to delete such things.

I cut names short, Ian, so that cannot be the difficulty. Because I find it tedious to hunt for a program through the menus, I keep the most often used ones on the desktop. No data files. Good to see the monkey again, I might add.

Perhaps "finite" would be more realistic than "infinite", Tyme. Had KDE been possessed of the infinite asininity you have in mind, I doubt that anyone would have used it. I'm sure that some people will wish to individually lock six or sixty icons in place: but it seems likely that that "some" will not be a substantial number, again for the reason that infinite asininity is a scarce commodity.

You said "right clicking" the first time, Tyme, and I saw that. Right clicking on an icon does indeed bring up a menu, but that menu has to do only with that particular icon.

Desktop, Tyme. I do click on icons, but that's when I'm after other things.

Scarecrow, the last option in the "Icons" sub-menu is "Align to Grid".

If you mean right clicking on the desktop, Scarecrow, the last option is "Log Out 'User'..." and the one above that is "Lock Session".

Each time I boot up MDV 2006 (KDE), I find that some icons on the desktop have jumped away from where I had left them. Annoying for an "everything in its place" old fellow. The "align to grid" option is checked.

I wouldn't know about that, Scarecrow, but www.scyld.com goes into some detail about the ways in which the programming has been messed up.

I did a chown -R user /home/user because chown -R user.user /home/user failed. It would, I suppose, since I used a full stop rather than a colon. Now to see what I run into on acount of shoving in user rather than user:user -- but Adobe Reader, which didn't run earlier, is now running, and thanks to you I have a heavy weapon in reserve.

No big deal, Devries. You may have set me on the right track with the lspci output -- or then again, you may not have been able to do that. These 8139s are crazy fellows. Ian, you're easily the biggest contributor to the -- whoosh -- 111 posts here, which must be some sort of record, and you say "with a bit of trouble"? A bit? We have a true master of understatement here. I did begin properly to rebuild my MDV 2006, but I'm stuck again: no write permission for $HOME. Devil knows how it happened. I guess a failsafe followed by chown or chmod will be needed. In Windows now, alas.

In my last post I'd actually said that the problem had NOT been solved. Now it is solved. At various places on the Net I saw, from what people had said, that the behaviour of the 8139 ethernet card was unpredictable: some examples worked perfectly, others worked less than perfectly, and still others would not work at all. These were supposedly identical. When I changed to a D-Link card, it was recognised immediately.

I'd like to thank everyone who tried to help. I'm still where I was, but I generally manage somehow to get to where I want to go. Thanks again. Mukul Dube (as Google, window to the world, knows me)

Have been hoping for a response, Devries. I have by now tried MDK 10.1, MDV 2006, PCLinuxOS and Puppy Linux, all of which give the 8139too as an option but then put me in an endless loop; and Knoppix 3.3, which simply says, "No supported network card found". Might something be the matter with this particular example of the card? I am able to connect through Windows, but I have never reached a speed over 11 kb/sec although the ISP promises "up to 75". This may of course be the fault of the ISP, which runs faster than I can chase it. I have asked my hardware chap to bring a card not based on Realtek stuff, but he too is playing hard to get. For the present, then, I can do nothing but look for these "options": debug multicast_filter_limit media full_duplex