theYinYeti

Well, it seems KVM is one more thing I'll want to investigate :) Anyway, it's nothing that serious: I don't even plan to install much software on the “virtual†machine, and it'll barely have network access. It's more of a test about what cannot be done and what can, and then with what performances. I'm always very curious about things, and sometimes too much for my own good maybe :lol: Yves.

Oh! So that is the answer! Thank you Ian! I find it really strange that the firefox plugin is not included in the VMWare download… or is it? After the RPM is installed, it says something about running …whatever….pl, a script that configures (almost) everything, and I did expect everything to be setup after that. Surely the Firefox' system-wide plugins-directory isn't that hard to find! Well, I did my experiments with VirtualBox after all. Quite neat IMHO. I was experimenting with booting a raw partition from a virtual machine, a bit like in this post. I followed “mesbalivernesâ€'s explanations and all went well. Not only does VirtualBox support the feature with a well-featured tool, but also, the resulting hard disk (vmdk) was immediately supported in the main GUI and working in the VM (and I did not have to tinker with lilo). (More over, VBox OSE seems to support USB now — I did not try —, and it now has a nice 3D support!) With VMWare on the other hand, such a hard disk has always been hand-crafted, and although the (also hand-crafted) machine description (vmx) was accepted by VMWare Server 1, the version 2 seems to reject the vmdk even though I did not write the vmx from the ground-up but instead carefully adapted the basic one (with no hard disk): even with the correct reference to the vmdk, and with the machine version equal to 4 (to match that of the vmdk), the GUI still shows the machine as having no hard disk… That's when I would have liked to see the machine booting, so I could see if the boot process matched the vmx (one HD), or matched the GUI (zero HD)… Now I have the solution, I suppose I'll take a look one coming day, if only to compare. Yves.

Hi, I'm toying with VMWare 2 and it's currently driving me mad !!!!!!!!!!! It installed OK, I created the VM, OK. BUT how do I see the GUI of this damn thing???? Not the web one, that one's fine. With VMWare 1, starting the VM allowed me to SEE it booting. Now all seems to happen in memory and I can't find how to SEEEEEE the guest! I found my way to the vmrun command and tried this: [yves@sedentaire ~]$ /usr/lib/vmware/bin/vmrun -T server -h https://localhost:8333/sdk -u yves -p xxxxxx start '[standard] VM/VM.vmx' Although I see things happening in the events list in the web GUI, still nothing REAL on screen! Even if I append 'gui' to the command above, as suggested by the help text. How does it work? Yves. [moved from Software by spinynorman]

Thanks tux99. I thank you for your help. It is unfortunately hard to diagnose things with this bewildering Bios because it reports different things in its menus and during the start screen! Thus, what I previously wrote may be wrong… or not. Needless to say, with such inconsistency, I got a little lost. I tried to play with the jumpers as you suggest. I checked the mode (was “Enhancedâ€, I did not try “Legacyâ€). I finally found a configuration that works, and I fervently hope I won't have to change it ever. I put the IDE HD as master (not cable-select), but that was not enough, so I played with enabling/disabling of S-ATA-II connectors. It happens that with S-ATA-II-3 and S-ATA-II-4 both enabled or both disabled, the DVD drive is not seen anymore. But with S-ATA-II-4 only disabled, then the DVD drive correctly shows on S-ATA-II-2… that's the first step :) Then I told the Bios to boot from DVD first, then HD, and set the boot HD to be the IDE one (only one HD can appear in the boot sequence). I rebooted and the empty black screen came again. In the Bios, the S-ATA HD was the boot HD! I insisted on placing the IDE HD as the boot HD a couple more time, and the DVD in first position, as the HD crept in first position once, and the PC finally accepted to boot from DVD if present else the IDE HD, even though the start screen still lists the S-ATA HD as the first HD :wacko: Yves.

You're welcome :) OK, don't hesitate to ask if you have doubts. Indeed, that's only a difference with the apostrophe. Since I switched to Dvorak kbd, I took the habit of writing French the right way, with quotes « like that », and real apostrophes, and real ellipses (…), but this good habit plays tricks on me because «, », …, and ’ need UTF-8 encoding, which is not always available. That's why for your texts I voluntarily reverted to standard “computerized-Frenchâ€. Interesting that you notice this Average thing :P as I wondered a lot how “Average selection†could be translated into a short phrase; English-speaking people probably don't realize how much meaning is conveyed by those two words. This particular translation is maybe a bit different in vocabular but is the result of long thinking… I thought that “Créer†(create a point) would imply some sort of work/creation by the computer, whereas “Ajouter†(add a point) would suggest something more dumb… It's maybe very personal… I don't know; feel free to change :) Yves.

I have an Asrock ConRoe945G-DVI. I find its bios to be absolutely awful! I never understood how disks are managed, and unfortunately no BIOS update seems to address the issue… The motherboard has 4 S-ATA-II connectors, and 1 P-ATA (master+slave) connector. When I rebuilt “sedentaireâ€, I put the boot disk (IDE) on the P-ATA connector as “cable-selectâ€, the data/backup disk on the S-ATA-II-1 connector, and the DVD drive on the S-ATA-II-2 connector. I reset the BIOS to its “optimal defaultsâ€, and saw that all three peripherals were shown, but the boot disk (cable select) showed as “slaveâ€. No problem, I halted the PC, changed the cable plug on the P-ATA disk, booted to BIOS, reset it anew, and the drive indeed showed as “master†this time, but then the DVD drive had disapeared! As it was still possible to select a generic "CD/DVD" item as the first boot device, I set it up that way and tried to boot the Mandriva 2009 DVD, to no avail… So I switched the PC off again, changed the cable plug on the P-ATA disk, booted to BIOS, and reset it anew. The drive of course reverted to “slave†and the DVD drive was back, and I set it up as the first boot device. This time the 2009 DVD booted fine, and the installation was a breeze, including installation of Grub on the boot disk (IDE) MBR. Unfortunately, the PC is now unable to start: It says the first boot device is not ATAPI-compliant (or something like that), “… press F1 to continue.â€, which I do but then the screen remains black with a blinking cursor on the top-left, and nothing happens. Is someone able to explain this “AMI Bios†(funny that: ami means friend in French; this AMI surely is not my friend) behaviour to me? Will I have to accept not being able to boot from CD/DVD to be able to boot from the IDE disk? Is it an entirely different matter? Yves. [note: Previously on this PC with two IDE disks, I managed to have both DVD and hard disk as possible boot devices by booting on the slave's MBR, and then switching master and slave in software using lilo commands, which led to a non-standard setup, difficult to repair when the need arose. I prefer not to repeat this setup if possible at all]

Are you part of the “floppy†group? It seems that this is the group for a usb key: [yves@localhost ~]$ ls -l /dev/sdb1 brw-rw---- 1 root floppy 8, 17 2009-01-20 11:34 /dev/sdb1 Yves.

The edit is done on the Wiki. I've tried to maintain coherence between texts. This means that some words were kept, although I would have sometimes chosen differently. Also, I wondered what encoding was acceptable. To be safe, I only used basic ISO-8859-1 characters. Examples : “Etes-vous sûr ?†instead of “Êtes-vous sûr ?â€Â ; “l'ajout†instead of “l’ajoutâ€Â ; and no unbreakable space (in French, “;?:!†punctuation marks must be preceded by a thin unbreakable space, but a normal unbreakable space is acceptable; in your texts, I used simple space characters). Yves.

When I volunteered for translating from Fr/En to En/Fr, I was thinking about translating posts for those who are not fluent enough in English. Yet, I don't mind at all translating thoses phrases for you. Where are those located ? Do you have special expectations regarding delay/schedule ? Yves.

Thanks viking777, This evening, I install XFCE on my main PC ("sedentaire", put back together yesterday evening after a change in hard disks). I'm sure your posts will guide me well. Yves.

Thank you Tux99, Although I do value the data I'll put on this disk, considering it is a new drive (not second-hand) and it should be reasonably safe given the test already passed, I'll leave it at that, and just use it as it is, because I'll also setup a backup of the important data on another disk, so I probably won't be unlucky enough to have two failing drives at the same time. Yves.

Hello, I bought a 1000GB Samsung F1 S-ATA2 hard disk. As suggested a couple of times on this forum lately, I launched badblocks -svw /dev/sda to check it was OK. I had previously no knowledge of this command, and I had no idea of the time it would require to complete. I launched it in the evening, and it said it was writing "0xaa" all over. As it was quite slow, I left it running overnight. At some point, it changed from writing to reading "0xaa". Some time later, it switched from reading to another pass at writing, but this time "0x55". But I had to leave for work, so I reluctantly interrupted this process at about 25% of this second writing session, and switched the PCÂ off. The program, apart from a constant progress indication, gave no information, either of success or of failure. Now I wonder: was it all pointless? What can I deduce from a completed first pass ("0xaa")? What failure might have slipped unseen given the remaining 3 passes ("0x55", "0xff", "0x00") were not run? Should I run it again until completion in the week-end? Yves.

The obvious answer is to mount the loop file and then run the df command. Is there any reason why you wouldn't want to mount the file? Yves.

Nothing out of the ordinary there… Sorry. If you find nothing on Google, then only exploration will give some hints. But that's hard to do without having the computer at hand… Yves.

Oh! That's not a good sign. You'll probably have to play with modelines to get to anything higher than 1024x768. I have no knowledge in this area though. Good luck. Maybe gtf can help you. Yves.

How is that external hard drive connected? firewire? USB? It might pose as a USB hub with two devices inside: the hard drive and a one-button-no-movement-mouse (ie: a clicks generator). If so, you might find this USB device under /dev… You might also get some clue by exploring the output of the lshal command. Yves.

No sorry… Isn't there some kind of error message if you start the program in a terminal window not as root? Yves.

What is the output of this command in a terminal window ? xrandr -q Yves.

Or drak3d. Or if for some reason, this program can't run, you can run drakx11 instead, then in the "graphics card" section, just accept what the program detects, but then don't accept the proprietary driver; this would probably disable 3D as well. Yves.

Could it be that DRI is not in mode 0666 in xorg.conf? Or that the codec files used to display the record belong to a group you're not a part of? In my opinion, it is such a permission problem… Yves.

Is your display a flat panel ? If so, is it set to its native resolution ? Yves.

There is no limit that I know. I have worked with images much bigger than that. Actually, this size seems a bit small to me. Maybe the file was truncated… Yves.

Very complicated in my opinion. I simply used Mandriva packages, following the errata and release notes where applicable. It simply worked (at last…). Mandriva 2009 is the distro with the fewer wifi problems I tried so far. Yves.

Welcome on board! I have a Samsung R40 for work, with an Atheros chipset (I think, as the “device†is ath0). With the newer Mandriva release, I have this strange issue that the key is not set! So instead I have to issue two commands at the command line, as root: iwconfig first for setting the key, the access point and the mode, and dhclient next for connecting. If I use ifup (equivalent to the GUI), then the key gets lost and connection fails. Good luck! Wifi has always been a hard part in Linux in my experience. Yves.

Make sure, on the server (remote) side, that .ssh is in mode 700 (drwx------), and authorized_keys is in mode 600 (-rw-------). Yves.