theYinYeti

Replacing wlan0 with eth2 could get the intended result. Yves.

Ian, be assured that this VMWare setup does work. I did it (maybe my post isn't clear about that). Windows does boot from the real MBR on the real hardware, and it also does boot from the fake MBR, linked to the real partition, inside the fake machine (VMWare) :D Unfortunately, amusing as it may be, it is simply useless, because of this activation thing :( I registered my work's XP again after booting inside VMWare, and it worked (without registering, it wouldn't work). Next reboot from the real hardware, I had to register XP again, and I decided it was the end of the game. If I understand correctly (I never had my own Windows), you can register only a limited number of times, and I can't afford to trash my job's XP license. Solution: instead of using Windows only a little (with VMWare), I don't use Windows at all! :P Yves.

Nice article Ian. For your information, VMware Server 1.x does have the functionality to use a physical partition. https://mandrivausers.org/index.php?s=&...st&p=413144 Yves.

Perhaps you could use "expect"…

Thank you Ian for this help on LVM. I have two questions. 1) Say, you want to get your third harddrive back, and the data theorically allows it (eg: you use 5GB out of the 40GB available — 20+20). What commands would ensure all the data is physically on the second drive before you remove the third one? And of course, in the process, you would have to resize the filesystem to the size the logical volume will have when the third drive is removed from the LVM, and then remove the drive from the LVM. How can you know this size beforehand? 2) A variant from the first question. I have this: Filesystem Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on /dev/mapper/Partitions-root 1,5G 290M 1,2G 20% / /dev/mapper/Partitions-home 1004M 506M 499M 51% /home /dev/mapper/Partitions-tmp 1,4G 33M 1,3G 3% /tmp /dev/mapper/Partitions-usr 3,0G 2,4G 589M 81% /usr /dev/mapper/Partitions-var 1000M 666M 334M 67% /var /dev/mapper/Partitions-data 3,9G 3,2G 786M 81% /data What would be the commands to move 1GB from / to /data? My problem here is that I can hardly unmount /… Yves.

vi is most usefull to know when you work in computing because ANY unix system always has this editor available. You don't have to use it for visudo though. Just set your EDITOR environment variable to nano, or even a GUI editor (but must be something that does not fork into the background. Yves.

Thank you for your answer Ian. Well… maybe I'm just trying to do too much too soon :) I'll have to learn and master the beast gradually. Yves.

You mention LVM. I was tempted and used it for the server at work. Then I wasn't able to find any tool that works for managing the LVM, thus defeating the whole idea. I thought I would be able to add space, resize space, remove space from the LVM, and do this on the live system. I found I was only able to add and resize, and the latter only after the partition was unmounted and in a very awkward way… What do you use for managing the LVM in an efficient and secure manner? For example, resizing (for me) was done by first shrinking the filesystem, and then shrinking the LVM. I don't find it secure at all: both tools speak different units, and I have no clue what each filesystem "overhead" is around its data, and I had no way to check that the second resize wasn't one byte too short or too far compared to the first. Yves.

Some graphics cards take RAM for themselves, thus lessening the amount of free RAM for the OS and applications. Yves.

Is it just C3, or also the C3-2? In other words, will Mandriva 2008.1 work on my M10000N, with on-board VIA C3-2 Nehemiah? ("salon" in signature) Yves. [EDIT:] I may have my answer: http://kernelfr.traduc.org/ftp/2.6.15/a_tr...86/Kconfig.cpu: I hope this means 2008.1 will work…

Search for "--auto-select" or "--auto-update" in previous posts, and you should find many usefull tips. Yves.

Thanks Ian :)

I usually do this from Mandriva Control Center, and only OpenOffice doesn't comply. Yves.

Welcome on board! Mandriva uses a tool called urpm for managing RPM files. This tool has: - text-mode front-ends: urpmi (install), urpme (remove), urpmq (query)… - a graphical front-end: rpmdrake, which is available standalone or inside the Mandriva Control Center. Using urpm, you can search RPM packages the name of which begin with "task-…": those are meta-packages that will install all dependences for a general aim. Among those are: task-gnome task-gnome-minimal task-kde task-kde4 task-kde4-minimal So I suppose the answer is YES Mandriva can. But then it depends on what you call minimal. Yves.

Is the default language the same for all your browsers? I mean: en-US, fr-BE, it-IT? Yves.

That's true. I also found Metisse much more geared towards productivity than Compiz, last time I tried 2 years ago. However, given it uses 2 X displays for its rendering, I'm a bit concerned about the resource usage it may have (I could be wrong, though). Yves.

I mostly agree with what is said above, except when it is written that compiz is useless. It isn't. True, the cube is 90% eye-candy, although it can give a nice overall view of all destops. Expo, on the other hand, achieves the same overall view, and allows dragging windows between workspaces like you do with a 2D desktop. So far, we only catch-up with the 2D desktop funtionality, though. Most of the added functionality is elsewhere, provided you take the time to set it up. Here is a short list of the active modules I have, and why, and with what setup (some words may be slightly inacurate due to translation from French): - General options: Opacity setting raised to 20 because it allows for quick changes. This is something I use very often to be able to type things in a window while seeing what is in the window bellow, as I do right now for seeing what settings I have in the CompizConfig window. I usually do this in OpenOffice. I defined some keyboard bindings of my own: . Super+Up = Raise the window . Super+Down = Lower the window . Super+PageUp = Raise opacity . Super+PageDown = Lower opacity - Window decoration + Place the window + Move the window + Resize the window + Image Loading/* + Workarounds + Snaping windows: Those are almost mandatory for normal use. - Cube + Viewport mouse switch + Cube reflexion + Window previews: nothing important, that's for the show :) - Cube rotate: This one is mainly there for keyboard bindings: . Ctrl+Alt+Left|Right = Previous|Next workspace . Shift+Ctrl+Alt+Left|Right = Previous|Next workspace and move the active window along . Alt+KP_1|2|3|4 = Go to face 1|2|3|4 . Ctrl+Alt+KP_1|2|3|4 = Go to face 1|2|3|4 and move the active window along - Expo: I bound it to the top left corner of the screen. So when I want to move windows between workspaces, I first throw the mouse pointer to this corner. Apart from that, I chose the Super+Tab shortcut. Now this is where it's getting interesting… - Group the windows: I checked "Move all from the group", "Raise all from the group", "Minimize with the group", "Shade with the group", "Group windows after the selection", and "Drop the group when a single window remains". As for key bindings, I set them according to the keys layout, not what's printed on them; important settings are: . Change the glow color (a bright pink glow is bound to attract attention at work :P ) . Group the selected windows . Undo the group . Remove the group . Close the group (be carefull with that one!) . Select a window . Group in tabs (that is put all windows in a single frame with pop-up tabs) . Go to previous/next tab - Put: This is a simple but extremely convenient extension. My settings are (it's a laptop, I substitued Shift for Fn): . Ctrl+Super+Shift+KP_1|2|3|…|7|8|9 = Put BottomLeft|Bottom|…|Top|TopRight . Ctrl+Super+Shift+KP_period = Put under pointer . Ctrl+Super+Shift+KP_0 = Restore initial position - Shift switcher: This is what I use for the usual Alt+Tab… funtionality. - Scale: Invaluable! I just bound the top right corner of the screen to this functionnality, and whenever I put the mouse in this corner, all windows are tiled in miniature so that I can choose to what window I want to go. Very usefull when the desktop gets crowded. And finally, the 3D desktop enables real transparency in some applications, such as Gnome-terminal, so you can type commands based on what you see in other windows (mail, forums, other terminal…). Yves.

Your numbers seem correct to me. Mine are actually very similar (with a bit more ram): [yves@localhost ~]$ free -m total used free shared buffers cached Mem: 883 873 9 0 61 365 -/+ buffers/cache: 446 436 Swap: 1027 0 1027 Yves.

Good to know :) I suspected as much but I currently try not to change default configs too much, so I wanted to know more before "taking the risk". Thank you! Yves.

Indeed, harddrake is enabled. What would be the consequences of disabling it? Yves.

Hello, My mandriva 2008.0 runs fine, and auto-configured itself. Nice. Here's the resulting xorg.conf mouse part: # File generated by XFdrake (rev 239302) […] Section "InputDevice" Identifier "Mouse1" Driver "mouse" Option "Protocol" "ExplorerPS/2" Option "Device" "/dev/mouse" EndSection The problem I have is that I want to append these options to this section: Option "EmulateWheel" "on" Option "EmulateWheelButton" "2" Option "EmulateWheelTimeout" "1000" Option "YAxisMapping" "4 5" Option "XAxisMapping" "6 7" If I do so and CtrlAltBackspace, the options are enabled. Good. Unfortunately, on next reboot (and that's at least twice a day), my added options are gone and I'm back to the original Section… What is the cure? Yves.

For your information, this is the setup I currently have for autofs: /etc/autofs/auto.master: +auto.master /home/yves/.mnt/ncp /etc/autofs/auto.ncpfs /home/yves/.mnt/smb /etc/autofs/auto.smbfs /etc/autofs/auto.smbfs: place1 -fstype=cifs,username=REMOTEUSER1,password=REMOTEPASSWD1,uid=LOCAL_UID,gid=LOCAL_ GID,noperm,noacl,iocharset=utf8 ://REMOTE.SERVER1/REMOTE_SHARE_NAME1 place2 -fstype=cifs,username=REMOTEUSER2,password=REMOTEPASSWD2,uid=LOCAL_UID,gid=LOCAL_ GID,noperm,noacl,iocharset=utf8 ://REMOTE.SERVER2/REMOTE_SHARE_NAME2 Then I create a ~/W directory where I create my "drives", for example: ~/W/U -> ../.mnt/smb/place1 ~/W/T -> ../.mnt/smb/place1/WIN and so on… Yves.

It is indeed not available in urpmi, but it is really easy and fast to compile. I suggest you install "checkinstall" first, then install wmctl by replacing the "make install" command with the "checkinstall" command: this will auto-create a RPM for you :) Yves.

If I understand correctly, Mdk9.2 (old) runs fine. It is Mdv 2008.1(aka Spring) (new) that does not. All cases when I had a similar situation was either with faulty media/DVD drive, or too old hardware, and Smithee's hardware is not such… From the "F3" and "verbose installation messages" parts of the message, I gather the DVD was correctly burnt (ie: as an ISO image). So a faulty media, maybe? Or bad luck. A long time ago, in case of installation problem, I used text-mode install. I don't know if it still exists. These days, I rather use the standard kernel parameters to avoid problems, such as "noapic nolapic". Worth trying. Anyway, we would be helped with a bit more information: what messages are displayed? Does the 2008.1 "One" LiveCD work? Yves.