theYinYeti

Nice :)

Please tell us what you think of Metisse after using it for a while. Its users are rare and it's always nice to see another point of view!

 

Yves.

I have no /etc/ppp/peers/ppp0 and /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/chat-ppp0 files!

It's been a long time since I used ppp but creating the missing files should work.

I noticed some strange characters in the posts I linked to… I'm positive those weren't there at the time I posted them. They should probably be translated into “TAB†characters…

 

Yves.

Well, I did not mention that before 1999, I used an Atari, so I never had Windows at home. Result: I had never heard of “compressed†Windows before and it escaped my attention.

 

I advise you to follow mindwave's advice. There's nothing like first-hand experience to tell you what is important.

 

You may think that's a lot of trouble to go into just to get a taste of Linux. But don't get discouraged. You don't have to hurry! Take your time ; meanwhile, Linux will only get better :) Linux, unlike Windows, is in permanent improvement, and to be honest sometimes great transitions don't go unnoticed, but they're worth the trouble in the end.

 

Yves.

I've always found that Metisse is much more oriented towards productivity than Compiz is. But I'm a keyboard-intensive user, and I don't have time to decipher fvwm's config files to setup all the shortcuts I want. That's the main reason I stick with Compiz so far (it has a GUI where you enable the modules that will give you the shortcuts you want).

That said, I find that Metisse basic features are better thought out than Compiz', and all it lacks compared to Compiz is users' contributions, if possible at all.

 

Yves.

There's probably some hardware that is confusing the installer. For example, I know I always have problems when installing Linux on my wife's Dell Inspiron 1501. I do manage, though.

 

Sometimes, the solution is to try one, or several, of the proposed additionnal boot options (noapic, nolapic, nomsi, irqpoll…); sometimes, changing the installation method does the trick, eg using One instead of Free, or the other way around; sometimes, the answer is to do a bare minimal install, with little more than X, or even no X at all, and then use urpmi to add task-x11 and task-gnome (for example). I hope this will give you some ideas. Good luck!

 

Yves.

Although I'm rather confident your situation is simple enough (provided you won't have bad luck with some hardware), be sure to backup your important data. If you don't have enough space on another local/USB hard disk, or enough RW CD/DVDs, but you have a LAN-connected PC with enough free space on its disks, that can do the trick.

 

Mandriva has, in my opinion, one of the best partitions manager available (along with Gparted). So yes, Mandriva 2009 should shrink your XP partition without data loss, and install Grub so you can choose either at boot. Be sure to first defragment your XP partitions repeatedly from within XP until the little color bars (in the defragmentation program) almost don't move from one run to the next.

You'll need at least 7GB free space for the “/†partition, and 512MB to 1GB swap, and whatever you need for your personal data (“/home†partition).

 

With the Mandriva installer (especially starting from the “One†CD), installing Linux isn't that much trouble anymore. Is it worth it for you? I don't know. In my opinion, it is; I only use Linux (except sometimes at work, and then, it's a pain) since 1999.

I do agree, though, that Linux isn't trouble-free. Most trouble comes from pieces of hardware that are not as well suported as one could wish, despite the open-source and free-software communities' best efforts, because hardware manufacturers rarely do and maintain anything for the Linux OS…

 

VirtualBox is as nice in Linux as it is in Windows, but on either side, it won't do any 3D stuff. Wine is faster and will do some (not a lot) 3D. The best results, but only for a subset of applications and games, are achieved with Transgaming's and Codeweavers' versions of Wine.

 

As for programming, Linux is a good OS for development, or so they say. I can't say much myself because I'm mainly a Java programmer, and most Java-related tools are cross-platform anyway.

 

Yves.

Here are posts that I wrote a long time ago, to explain what I did to use ppp directly:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=132068

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=204253

 

Yves.

Do you mean that Japanese is a dying language? Will all japanese anime and manga in the future be in English? Or in Hiragana/Katakana only? In ten years from now? Or one hundred?

 

Yves.

In case that's any help to you, here's a script I wrote that achieves more or less what --auto-orphans does, and suggests things you could try to remove to achieve your goal:

 

#!/bin/bash
# $1: task meta-package (eg: task-kde4)

read -a packages < <( \
 urpmq --requires "$1" 2>/dev/null | tr '|' '\n' \
 | while read p; do
  rpm -q "$p" &>/dev/null && { rpm -q --whatrequires "$p" &>/dev/null || echo "$p"; }
done \
 | sort -u \
)

read -p "Remove those ? $1 ${packages[*]} (y/n)" ynAns
[ "$ynAns" == "y" ] && urpme "$1" "${packages[@]}"

echo Top 20 packages to remove in priority:
urpmq --requires "$1" 2>/dev/null | tr '|' '\n' \
| while read p; do
LANGUAGE=C rpm -q "$p" 2>&1 | grep -vF 'is not installed' && { LANGUAGE=C rpm -q --whatrequires "$p" | grep -vF 'no package requires'; }
 done \
| sort | uniq -c | sort -nr | head -n 20

 

Be sure to review the lists presented to you, because those come straight from dependency checking, without any sanity check. Eg: don't go and remove bash, or basesystem, or glibc… Usage example: /path/to/script.sh task-kde4

 

Yves.

:lol:

 

Actually, I'm starting to think that Mnemosyne is maybe better than Anki, after all. Its scheduling method adapts more to your (free) time, and it is easier to use in my opinion. As for scim, I think I may just have to install scim-bridge-qt3 to have it working (so far, I only installed scim-bridge-qt4 for Qt).

 

Yves.

« urpme --auto-orphans »

Same as above, it's just removed the metapackage, not all the packages called by it.

Strange… The disapearance of the meta-packages should have made all of these meta-packages' dependencis “orphansâ€. Thus, the last line I gave should have removed all you wanted to, provided you use Mandriva 2009 of course.

 

I don't understand. Something must have evolved, as this behaviour was a surprise to some people. If so, I hope Mandriva came up with an alternative way of achieving this usefull task.

 

Yves.

You may just be the latest victim of KDE4. I've not tried it, but it seems the “desktop†doesn't quite exist anymore in KDE4. Instead, there are special-window-like-plasmas (or something like that) placed of the background, that show you views on selected files, and one of which you may want to call your desktop.

That's what I understand from reading the web…

 

Yves.

My work's proxy denies access to http://ftp.free.fr/. Given urpmi is configured to use $MIRRORLIST, how do tell urpmi to blacklist http://ftp.free.fr? I'd like to do the same with any mirror with the FTP protocol (ftp://…), as those are forbiden too.

 

Actually, this could be the cause of my other problem:

https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=73554

 

Yves.

 

 

[moved from Installing Mandriva by spinynorman]

I settled for Mnemosyne.

It seems not as good as Anki, and so far, scim doesn't work with it, but overall, I like it. Besides, I like how easy it is to add your own cards.

 

Yves.

If you use Mandriva 2009, you can do this:

urpmi task-gnome
urpme task-kde3 task-kde3-devel task-kde4 task-kde4-devel task-kde4-minimal task-xfce task-xfce-devel task-xfce-minimal task-xfce-plugins
urpme --auto-orphans

Take care: the first line is very important! Without task-gnome installed, you'll have your Gnome desktop removed as well.

 

Yves.

No luck.

— From the lines you gave to me for IM initialisation, I only kept GTK_IM_MODULE, as this one seems enough for Firefox and Geany. Not for OpenOffice though; I'll probably have to put the XMODIFIERS line back, now that my tests are done.

— I rebooted the PC.

— I removed from my home directory any file related to Anki, basically: ~/.anki and ~/tmp/anki*.

 

Still the same error. Well, I'll try and find an alternative to Anki (preferably Gtk-based).

 

Yves.

While I still appreciate the help received, I spoke too fast about the fore-mentionned total success.

Actually, all is working fine… except Anki! That's ironic, to say the least.

 

Now that I installed scim-anthy, scim-bridge-gtk, and scim-bridge-qt4, without any other change (except the .bashrc), running Anki gives:

[yves@localhost ~]$ anki
Fatal Python error: (pygame parachute) Segmentation Fault
Abandon

I tried removing pygame, as it is optional for Anki, but I still get:

[yves@localhost ~]$ anki
Segmentation Fault

On the other hand, this failure is only for me. I created a test user, and this user (who does not have the modified .bashrc) can run Anki…

Any idea what could be wrong, and how I could trick Anki into believing all is still as it was before?

 

Yves.

All is working perfectly! ç§ã¯æ—¥æœ¬ã®è¨€èªžã‚’å­¦ã¶ã€‚ And Rikaichan is nice too. Thank you again!

 

I don't have the slightest understanding of Anthy's configuration options, but it seems to me that “direct input†(draw kana and kanji with the mouse = sign recognition) is not one of them. Do you know if that is possible? It would be great for learning to write correctly.

 

Meanwhile, I'll keep learning with Anki.

 

Yves.

I've been reading this since the begining, but did not answer because I don't know gimpshop other than by name…

There's something that seems so obvious to me that I didn't even thought it would need being said, but maybe it isn't that obvious after all…

 

Two things actually:

— In Gimp, first thing I do upon first use is that I drag'n'drop all dialogs I need within the main container (the one with the File menu and the tools) and close all other dialogs. Result: I don't have many windows opened, just one per picture, and only one more with all the tools and options.

— I did not try yet, but it seems latest Gimp has changed so that your task bar is even less clutered!

 

So, really, my opinion is you should just try Gimp.

 

Yves.

Booting in text mode is a simple matter of appending "3" to the kernel boot options (in Grub or Lilo).

Then you can edit /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and replace the graphics driver with "vesa", or better run drakx11 and let it edit the file.

 

Yves.

I'm not sure this is the right place as it is about updating/upgrading, not installing… Anyway, here we go:

 

Before the switch to 2009.0, urpmi worked great wether at home (no proxy) or at work (with proxy) because the switch in network profile made the adequate changes to these environment variables: http_proxy, ftp_proxy, https_proxy and no_proxy.

 

Since I switched to 2009.0, I'm unable to install/update/upgrade from work! And I can't set the proxy at the urpmi level since there is no proxy when I use a different network profile.

 

From what I understand, the download is handled by aria2c, so I tried renaming it to aria2c.REAL, and created this script instead:

#!/bin/bash

if [ -n "$http_proxy" ] && ! grep '[-]-http-proxy' <<<"$*" >/dev/null; then
	params=(
			--lowest-speed-limit=0
			--timeout=300
			--http-proxy="${http_proxy#*://}"
			--ftp-via-http-proxy=tunnel
			--metalink-preferred-protocol=http
			--metalink-enable-unique-protocol=true
	)
	count=${#params[*]}
	regex1="^($(tr ' ' '|' <<<"${params[*]}" | sed 's/=[^|]*//g'))"
	regex2="^($(tr ' ' '|' <<<"${params[*]}" | sed 's/=[^|]*/=/g'))"
	while [ $# -gt 0 ]; do
			if ! grep -E "$regex1" <<<"$1" >/dev/null; then
					count=$(($count + 1))
					params[$count]="$1"
			elif ! grep -E "$regex2" <<<"$1" >/dev/null; then
					shift
			fi
			shift
	done
	/usr/bin/aria2c.REAL "${params[@]}"
else
	/usr/bin/aria2c.REAL "$@"
fi

To my dismay, this did not help.

 

What can I do for being seamlessly able to install/update wether I'm behind a proxy or not?

 

Yves.

Thank you Soka!

 

I'll follow your instructions. I just hope it won't break my French keyboard; indeed, the Dvorak wiki instructed to put that in .bashrc:

export GTK_IM_MODULE=xim

I'll try and see… I know how to repair things if needed :)

 

I'll try Rikaichan too.

 

Yves.

I forgot to tell something. I have a problem with SCIM, the way it currently works.

 

With most (but not all) Gnome applications, I can right-click any editable area, switch the input method from “System†to “SCIM†and then start typing roumanji, that gets converted on-the-fly to hiragana/kanji.

 

However, with some other Gtk applications (Geany…), and in Firefox, and for all KDE/Qt applications, SCIM seems to be unavailable!

 

Yves.

The sound comes from the capture device. It is not dependent upon tvtime. To mute the sound, you'll have to open the sound mixer, locate the right sound channel (eg: Line1), and then… mute it :)

 

As for sound in TVtime, this software (otherwise excellent) has the unnerving habit of ignoring some of your prefered settings, among which is audio level adjustment. At launch, TVtime lowers the sound level to 50%; to make it hearable again, use the [->] (right arrow) key.

 

Yves.

Hi,

 

I've started to learn Japanese yesterday. While I still want to keep my French Dvorak keyboard for everyday use, I'd like to be able to enter Japanese text in any application, and I'd be glad to get help from some learning software.

So here I am, asking for advice for the right configuration, and maybe some helpful tools.

 

So far, I installed all japanese-related fonts I could find with urpmi, and downloaded and installed Anki, along with the Hiragana+Katakana lesson. I'm rather pleased with it, although I think I'll find it a bit limited after a month or two…

On the input front, I installed scim-honoka and im-ja; I find the former average, and the latter unusable, but maybe neither is set up right, as few of the configuration option mean anything to me.

What I would like is being able to “draw†the kanji or hiragana instead of typing roumanji…

 

Yves.