JonEberger

awesome. all i know is that it saves me tons of time. :-) that's some good info to know.

to add my two cents....there is also a linux google. the address is http://www.google.com/linux. it's wonderful and really helps to narrow down your search. (i think it's the same as putting "linux" in every search.)

wow. it seems like you've really dotted your i's and crossed your t's. so, one thing to ask you to check...(i always forget this)...the default (even in Mandriva) is to set this sound card to a digital out. depending on whether yours is set up to be digital or not this could cause problems. it's caused me problems before. i presume you've got your connections set up right too. my audigy has like 18 ports (not really) that all look the same on the back. good luck. i know my audigy works well. yours should indeed.

my wife's laptop (which i am currently using) is a p4, 3.2 GHz HT. it runs circles around my 2.26 P4 (no HT). i don't know how that compares to a new AMD, but this guy is smoking.

i'm a mathematician. i crunch numbers. all the code i write is for the purpose of number crunching. sometime ago my then friend (now wife) and i were assigned to write a program that did some basic floating point operations. i had an amd k7 700 and she had a p3-450. our answers were so different (mine obviously wrong) that i became biased. well, i know that this could be explained away 80-thousand different ways. but it could've also had something to do with the fpu. ever since, i've strayed away from them for computation. if i were building a gamer (again) i'd put in an amd in a heartbeat. in fact i'd give the 64 bit another shot for the purpose of number-crunching. my amd/nvidia combo was sure nice. i'd probably get another one in a laptop just to lower the price. performance on most everything doesn't phase me. but i'm just nervous on some of the stuff. is that even an issue anymore? does anyone else out there do strictly numerical computations on an amd? if so, what compiler?

from commandline do a menudrake and then save and exit. those things should be in your menu.

i've been impressed with the speed of 2005. but man i really enjoyed 10.1 and 10.0. those were some good distro versions. the worst part of 2005 is that weird stone-looking penguin before you disable the graphical boot.

actually i'm pretty sure there were pentium class 133 MHz that used the pc66 sdram. i said depending on your mobo, because if yours is one of those that did the pc66 ram, then pc100/133 abounds in computer stores around. most of the sdram is backward compatible. but, you're probably like all the rest of us, and know exactly what your hardware is. with the advance webpage design, then the gui might be nice. i'd def. put one of the lightweight windowmanagers on. good luck wth it all.

so, i've been using linux since the late 90's. i'll be the first to admit that even Mandriva sometimes has flaws. but that's no reason not to use it. go back and install windows 95. (if you can find the disk, that is.) and then try to use it. i did this not long ago and was appalled at what i had settled for in the past. the same for windows 98. i got a blue-screen every 30-40 seconds. no kidding. windows ME wasn't much better. windows 2000 was the first windows that i truly found reliable. i then went to windows XP. in about 6 months i had issues with stability. i demanded too much. linux was no doubt a change when i started using it. it took a little while. just like picking up the gui for windows back in the day did. but now....i leave my linux box (quite literally) for months on end. i install software (using the command line urpmi) for free and quickly. something else that linux affords me is complete (i mean god-like) control. i can make that os do anything i want it to do (well almost). with windows, the control IS there....but most of us have no idea how to get to it. another difference is the user-roots of linux. back in the day linux gained alot of popularity among college kids and then slowly filtered its way into the rest of the world. windows gained it's popularity when there was really no other alternative. it then gained it's strength. so give Mandriva a shot. really. once you get the hang of it, it will treat you very well. good luck!

another option is to look for an older version of the distribution. i know you can still find older versions around. mandrake 8.2 (if you can find it somewhere) might be my favorite mandrake version ever and it would've run pretty well on your machine. i recommend then downloading and installing the source for fluxbox. a quick google will find this easily. i run it on my p4 because it frees up so many processes. if you need the eye-candy of gnome or kde, i suggest you look for a stouter pc. the only problem with using the old distro and the new packages is that you might have to do some dependency resolution. i don't know if there is an easyurpmi site for old mandrake versions. if so...that's the way to go. because urpmi will make your life way easier. what are you looking to do with this machine? is it just going to be a server, or do you need the gui? i don't know if memory is your only issue, but if you need the memory, depending on your mobo, pc100 is pretty cheap. that might be a decent fix for cheap. you can find systems that are considerably better for reasonably small amounts of money. heck....most of us have old systems that we'd give to you. good luck.

my guess is that pcmcia is the way to go if you have a laptop. i always tried to get the drivers going and never could. but i'm not the most linux-apt in the world. :-)

sup bags. i gave the old standard urpmi freevo as root and it works like a champ on my desktop (as far as i can tell). the video inputs are working so well under linux, but i hope that will soon be fixed. i've got a friend who's doing this with myth-tv. i guess you could give that a shot. good luck and keep us posted with your project.

i think if you use the smp kernel and your machine can't use it, it still works fine. that's my understanding from stuff i've read. but i've ran an smp kernel for a long time on a non-ht p4. i think with ht is when the p4 could actually take advantage of the smp kernel.

i enjoy the command line although i'll admit i don't know enough to use it as efficiently as many.

Without looking I'd say go hit http://ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net. They have good documentation and support a humongous number of cards. The Wiki is fantastic.

I had a camera that didn't mount cleanly. So while this sucks, I didn't mind doing it. First I had to a make a directory under /mnt like /camera or something obvious like that (as root or su of course). Then I did a mount -t vfat /dev/sda1 /mnt/camera which mounts the camera as a fat partition to the /mnt directory strucure. /dev/sda1 is typically where I find the camera (I presume this has to do with the number of USB devices that I have continaully attached to my machine). But I'd totally do all of the suggestions that Ian made first. Hotplug is key and updates are too. Good luck!

hey john, the best thing for this really is the urpmi solution. there's a link at the top of this forum (i think) that tells you how to do the easyurpmi setup for your mandriva box. then as root (or just su) do a "urpmi firestarter" and it works. i've done it before on smaller systems but always went back to shorewall. good luck.

it has for me. i can't think of a reason that it shouldn't. every cd of mp3's ihave has always worked.

hey mike have you added an "ifcfg-wlan0" file in the directory /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts ? you'll need that if you haven't. i also totally agree on the need for an iwconfig and an ifconfig post. as for the driver, the ndiswrapper folk say to download the proper driver and not use the one on your cd. from experience, i recommend the same. don't know why. i'd grab the newest version of ndiswrapper at ndiswrapper.sourceforge.net and go from there as well. then i'd follow hte instructions on the wiki page verbatim. i have the dwl-650 version m. mine works like a champ considering my router kinda sucks.

thunderbird all the way. i just love everything bout it.

i'm not really sure where to look for that. any help?

i sure did. then i rpm -e jpilot rpm -e pilot-link rpm -e libpisock++0 to get rid of old packages and add the new ones. same story.

so i do a urpmi jpilot after having set up mirrors using easyurpmi. when i go to launch jpilot i get this: jpilot: error while loading shared libraries: libpisock.so.8: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory any ideas? i don't use linux hard enough now to remember these things. thanks, jon [moved from Software by spinynorman]

so personally i don't like java. i don't enjoy coding in java. i use matlab alot and the java interface is unstable at best and uses alot of the resources. so why do i bother to learn java? it's completely necessary. there's this language that can go cross-platform (with relative ease). it's so widely used that alot of schools are picking it up as their primary teaching language. that's huge. free compilers abound. it's nice from alot of standpoints. i don't particularly think c++ (and especially plain old c) is easy to code in. did that stop most of the modern world from uysing it? it can be made horrible cryptic. but it's fast and served the purpose of the time. plus it's versatile. java fills the same niche today. it runs well enough and can cut production time way down.

i prefer the kde. so much stuff is automatic. it is without a doubt my preference for a windows replacement. i do however use fluxbox on the machines that are lesser powered or that i want all the processing power to the app instead of the desktop. kde (esp. the new one) does alot of stuff very easily and nicely for you. it's quick and pretty speedy with the ability to do lots and lots with anything pretty. i love transparency. the real truth is that i don't like the interface for gnome. and there's no "this one is better than that one" but for me, it works best.