mousematt

THIS IS MANDRAKEMAG: A FREE MANDRAKELINUX E-ZINE Volume 01 - Issue 03 - Thursday, 12 August 2004 - http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au IN THIS ISSUE - MOUSEMATT'S OPENING MONOLOGUE - HOW TO URPMI INSTALL MOZILLA FIREFOX 0.9.3 - THE BOURNE AGAIN SUPREMACY (BY CHRISTOPHER FA JOHNSON) - WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE CLUB - PLAYING DVD MOVIES WITH MANDRAKELINUX 10.0 - IN THE NEXT ISSUE ================================================================================ MOUSEMATT'S OPENING MONOLOGUE MandrakeMag Is Not Dead! Despite rumours, reports and fears to the contrary, this zine is live and well! Why is this issue five weeks late? Ask Seagate; my boss - who decided to promote me; Murdoch University's teaching timetable; and whoever invented the flu virus! :P On the 21st of July, the read/write head of my hard drive decided to take up dancing: it wildly danced across the surface of my hard disk and took my entire life with it! I did have backups of some essential data: my thesis, the MandrakeMag subscriber list, my address books... but at the end of the day, I lost about 25GB of data. And that hasn't been fun to put back! A few dollars, a new hard disk and a shiny DVD burner later - and I'm back online. I have spent the past few weeks re-ripping my CD collection, regoogling for a lot of the articles that were the basis for my thesis, and recovering thousands of happy snaps from the spindle of photo CDs in my cupboard. At the end of the day, time slipped - work got busy - and I returned to university to start a new semester. Now, five weeks later, MandrakeMag is back in business! This is a short, diluted issue. The bumper business edition will be coming to your inboxes shortly. For now, this issue introduces a new contributor; Linux command-line guru and chess artisan, Christopher FA Johnson. I'd recommend every newbie read Christopher's excellent article on the advantages of the command line interface. Want to install the latest version of Mozilla Firefox on your Mandrakelinux box? I've written a quick article on how to install and configure this great application under a Mandrakelinux KDE desktop. Remember to backup your data... and please, enjoy MandrakeMag Issue 03! ================================================================================ HOW TO INSTALL THE LATEST MOZILLA FIREFOX USING URPMI: by Matthew Prouse For those of you who have been living under a rock for the past 18 months, Mozilla Firefox is the next generation web browser from the Mozilla Foundation. The official Firefox site is at http://www.mozilla.org/products/firefox/. I won't go into details here about how spiffy the Firefox browser is: I will just make a suggestion - TRY IT! The current Linux version of Firefox (0.9.3) ships with an installer that is reasonably easy to use, although it doesn't show you how to install Firefox as a multi-user application. Most applications in Mandrakelinux are multi-user; with separate user profile and a root-only /usr/ application system folder. This is probably the best way to install Linux software - it's much harder for a single user without root priveleges to break a computer program if its set up this way. Okay! How do you do it? Isn't it just "urpmi mozilla-firefox"? At present, the Mandrakelinux 10.0 contrib mirror has an RPM for Firefox 0.8. This is a powerful, fast and user friendly web browser; but it is not the latest and greatest version. A lot of available extensions and themes do not work with the version. However, Chip Cuccio has packaged the latest versions of XMMS, Firefox, Abiword and Mozilla Thunderbird and made them available in his URPMI Package Repository. Chip's website is http://norlug.org/~chipster/ For those lazy people who do not want to surf to other websites - just to get the setup instructions :-) - connect to the internet and do the following. 1. Open a new console window (KDE comes with Konsole) 2. Type su and become the administrator (root) 3. Type in the following text to add Chip's repository to your URPMI setup urpmi.addmedia NORLUG-10.0 \ http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/mirrors/norlug/...rake-10.0/RPMS/ \ with hdlist.cz 4. Wait for urpmi to retreive the package list. You can now install RPM packages from Chip's repository. 5. To install Mozilla Firefox 0.9.3 from Chip's repository type the following command in the same console window as above. Type: urpmi mozilla-firefox And wait for the package to download and install. Now follow the next two steps to configure Firefox 0.9.3 properly and it will be ready to go. 6. Run Mozilla Firefox once as the root user to set up the plugins and extensions correctly. To do that, press Alt F2, and type: kdesu mozilla-firefox Mozilla Firefox will now load for the first time. Once it has finished, close it down immediately. To run Firefox as your normal user, navigate the Mandrake menu to "Internet > Web browsers > Mozilla Firefox" The browser should load properly now. That only leaves three things to do: set up Java; change the hideous winstripe toolbar theme to something better and select and install a couple of essential extensions. ** Configuring the Java plugin I am assuming you are running the latest Java runtime. At the time of publication it is j2re-1.4.2_05. The Java runtime RPM is easilly installed from MandrakeClub or via the official download from Sun Microsystems. The Sun Microsystems download URL is: http://javashoplm.sun.com/ECom/docs/Welcom...tailId=j2re-1.4 .2_05-oth-JPR&TransactionId=noreg Once you have installed the java-runtime, open a console as the administrator (root) and type the following commands. cd /usr/lib/mozilla-firefox-0.9.3/plugins ln -s /usr/java/j2re1.4.2_05/plugin/i386/ns610-gcc32/libjavaplugin_oji.so I know thats a mouthful... but it works! To check that Firefox has properly enabled the Java plugin change the URL address location to "about:plugins". The Java 2 Plugin should be listed on this screen. If it isn't, then browse through the help files at http://plugindoc.mozdev.org/faqs/firefox-linux.html ** Changing the Firefox theme The Firefox 0.9 series comes with a nifty theme manager. There are literally hundreds of themes available for this great browser. To check out a few semi-official ones: surf your browser to http://update.mozilla.org Select a new theme and click "install now". I personally like the Qute, Mostly Crystal and Phoenity themes; but I am certain the perfect theme for every person is available on this site. ** Adding extensions to Firefox 0.9.3 Extensions add extra functions and extra bloat to the naturally slim Firefox web browser. They are also available from http://update.mozilla.org I recommend that you install AdBlock, BBCode and Flash Click-to-View. If you need more help with Firefox or want to get involved in the Mozilla community. I suggest you log on to http://forums.mozillazine.org ================================================================================ THE BOURNE AGAIN SUPREMACY: by Christopher FA Johnson One day last year, I was in the computer room of a hotel, and had connected to my home computer via secure shell (SSH). Someone looked over my shoulder and said in a condescending tone, "What is that, DOS?" "No," I replied, "it's a Unix shell." "It looks like DOS." "It's like DOS about as much as a Formula 1 racing car a is like a rickshaw," I countered. The default shell on Linux distros is bash, the Bourne Again SHell. Its syntax is based on the Bourne shell, the original (not quite the first, but the pre-eminent) Unix shell, which first appeared in 1974. Why would one use the shell instead of a point-and-clock interface? The P&C is so much easier, isn't it? Well, the P&C may be easier but it can have disadvantages. Let's look at a example, finding and installing a package. I want to find and install a chess program. Using the desktop menu: 1. Open the Mandrake Control Centre (I may have to enter a password at this point) 2. select Software management 3. select install (wait several seconds while it loads) 4. enter "chess" in the search box, and press enter 5. select one or more of the packages found 6. click install 7. lose a couple of keystrokes in the window I was working in while waiting for the install because of the annoying pop-up telling me that all packages were successfully installed. 8. click OK on the annoying pop-up 9. wait for a few seconds while it finds available packages again 10. click on the window's close button Using the command line: 1. urpmq chess ## (to get a list of chess programs) 2. sudo urpmi gnuchess gnuchess-book emacs-chess And it's done, much faster and with no more typing than the P&C method (I built the urpmi command by cutting and pasting the output of urpmq). In fact, I used a command that is somewhat faster than urpmq: urpms. You don't have that command because I wrote it myself. It's a very simple command that takes advantage of the /var/lib/urpmi/names.* files in Mandrake 10.0. If you want it, type the following line at the prompt: urpms() { grep -hi "$1" /var/lib/urpmi/names.*; } You can install the command permanently by putting the line in your $HOME/.bashrc file. Besides being an interactive command interpreter, the shell is a complete programming language. At its simplest, a shell script is a sequence of commands (or even a single command) in a file that is marked executable. Personal scripts are usually put in a directory called bin, in a user's HOME directory. Instead of putting urpms in a function, it could be a file by itself. The following commands (type them, or cut and paste them, at the command line) set up the directory, put the command into a file, and make the file executable. mkdir -p $HOME/bin echo 'grep -hi "$1" /var/lib/urpmi/names.*' > $HOME/bin/urpms chmod +x $HOME/bin/urpms echo "PATH=$PATH:$HOME/bin" >> $HOME/.bashrc You can put any commonly used, or hard to remember, commands into a file in a directory included in $PATH, make it executable, and use it just like any other command. What directories are in your path? Type: printf "\t%s\n" ${PATH//:/ } Your homework is to create a command (call it "path") that prints the directories in your PATH variable one to a line. ================================================================================ WHAT'S HAPPENING AT THE CLUB A lot of people wonder what happens at MandrakeClub! The easiest way to find out - and support the future development of our favorite Linux distribution is to join MandrakeClub (http://www.mandrakeclub.com). In the last five weeks, Mandrakeclub has launched a new IRC chat server for club members, released RPMS for Mozilla 1.7, OpenOffice 1.1.2 and the latest drivers for ATI and NVIDIA graphics cards. A new-look discussion forum is in late-BETA and club members are busy voting for applications to be included in Mandrakelinux 10.1. Memberships start at 60 EURO per year. Why not join and support the future of Mandrakesoft? ================================================================================ HOW TO PLAY DVD MOVIES WITH MANDRAKELINUX I recently bought a 4KUS 8X DVD ReWriter for my primary desktop machine. It installed simply and Mandrake automatically detected it... excellent. Now, how do I watch Babylon 5 DVDs on my PC? No "free" Linux distribution can legally play DVDs out of the box. DVD movie playback requires an additional software decryption library that is not 100% "legal" in most developed countries. This is because the decryption software allows for videos to be copied as well as played. Fortunately, the software is easy to install using the PLF (http://plf.zarb.org) repositories and URPMI. If you want to play DVDs under Mandrakelinux 10.0 then type the following command as root: urpmi libdvdcss2 Wait a few seconds and presto! DVD video playback. I have found the best app for playing DVD movies on my PC is Totem (http://www.hadess.net/totem.php3). It is installed by default in 10.0. Other applications to consider for DVD playback include Ogle, Xine and MPlayer. I'll write a bit more about DVD movies under Linux in later issues; for now, I am going back to Babylon 5 http://www2.warnerbros.com/babylon5/). ================================================================================ IN THE NEXT ISSUE The next issue will be published in three weeks time. It will be a bumper issue with a detailed look at Small Business Mandrakelinux. Expect some comprehensive guides on setting up small business servers, an interview with the Kumula software team, and a basic guide to essential software and hardware systems. It should be an interesting read. I'd like to ask everyone to drop me a line and share their thoughts, articles or stories. I am looking forward to editing a bumper issue of MandrakeMag. Thankyou for reading this issue of MandrakeMag. Remember to check out the recently updated MandrakeMag website at http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au Comments. Suggestions. Ideas. Feel free to contact me. Bye for now! mousematt ================================================================================ ©2004 Matthew Prouse. All Rights Reserved. E-zine is totally independent of Mandrakesoft SA. Mandrakelinux is a registered trademark of Mandrakesoft SA. Linux is a registered trademark of Linus Torvalds. The MandrakeMag website is kindly hosted by Tux Computing (http://www.tux.com.au). PRIVACY STATEMENT: MandrakeMag respects your privacy! Any and all information collected at this site will be kept strictly confidential and will not be sold, reused, rented, loaned, or otherwise disclosed. Any information you give to MandrakeMag will be held with the utmost care, and will not be used in ways that you have not consented to. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact MandrakeMag. ================================================================================ MandrakeMag : a mandrakelinux e-zine. http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au

You don't need to find the file. Press Alt F2 and type: kdesu mozilla-thunderbird Enter your root password. Thunderbird will load. As soon as it has appeared: close the window... you don't need to run thunderbird as root ever again. To setup your account and start using Thunderbird: run it from the Mandrake menu.

This is a known bug with the new flaming animal applications. Easy fix. Open a terminal: log in as root and execute the application. It will load up once and create the necessary files. Close it down and then execute it as a normal user. This is also true for Mozilla Firefox 0.9.1 RPMS as well. Reply if this solves your problem - or if your problem continues.

Thanks Gowator. I know Greg Martin uses Photoshop: I was admiring the end result not the pots and pans used to create it! :-P Do I add you to the subscriber list then? And would anyone complain if I post issue two here next week?

Is that a good thing? Are you keeping it cos its bad or cos its good? I didn't think it was a comic book... its jus plain text about Mandrakelinux 10.0 :-)

THIS IS MANDRAKEMAG: A FREE MANDRAKELINUX E-ZINE Volume 01 - Issue 01 - Day, 05 June 2004 - http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au IN THIS ISSUE - a message from the editor - six reviews of mandrakelinux ten - an interview with anne wilson, mandrake community twiki - newbies: five smart things to do after installation - I want to play quicktime movies... what do i need? - this issue's desktop artwork - contribute and contact information MANDRAKEMAG IS NOT SPAM. If you wish to cancel your subscription then send an email to mandrakemag@webace.com.au with UNSUBSCRIBE in the message subject line. This issue was published online at http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au on Thursday, 10 June 2004. ====================================================================== MOUSEMATT'S OPENING MONOLOGUE (a message from the editor) MandrakeMag is not spam - its a free online magazine published via plain text email and devoid of corporate messages, advertisements and marketing. It's retro - a blast from the past. A new relic from an Internet before rich text emails, flash movies, version four browsers, worms, viruses and spam. I started MandrakeMag on a whim: a burst of inspiration, and have spent the past few months working out if I really had time to do this, and how I was going make it possible. My aim is simple: to produce an interesting, intelligent, user friendly e-zine that tells stories, shares knowledge and helps other people get excited about Mandrakelinux - my favorite Linux desktop distribution. More importantly, this little magazine is designed to build another dimension to the Mandrakelinux community. This first issue, is a little shorter than I would have hoped. However, I am very happy with how its turned out. I was going to write a review of Mandrake 10 Official, but to be honest, my early drafts were too long - and just repeated a lot of things that have already been said by other people. So, rather than say it all again; I have published the links to a number of Mandrake Ten reviews and written a sentence or two. This issue contains a very extensive interview with Anne Wilson, a retired school teacher and "leading light" of the Mandrake Community Twiki project. The interview is well worth the read, and more importantly, the Twiki is well worth helping out. It is slowly growing into an incredible knowledge base for Mandrake users - but it can only benefit from everyone's contribution. This first edition also contains some links to some great desktop artwork, instructions on how to play Windows Media and Quicktime movies from inside your web browser; and an opportunity for other readers to share their thoughts. Thank you very much for subscribing to the first issue of MandrakeMag; I am sorry its a couple of days later. The next issue will be on time. I welcome your ideas and contributions. Just send me an email if you have a comment or want to help out: mousematt at webace dot com dot au Welcome to MandrakeMag Issue One: And so it begins... ====================================================================== SIX REVIEWS OF MANDRAKELINUX TEN I've selected six different reviews of Mandrakelinux 10. The first two review the stable, and now freely available official edition - the other four review the Community pre-release. To summarize, these reviewers all tend to agree that 10 is the best Mandrake release to date. Some reviewers encountered a few quirks and the occasional bug - but the broad consensus is that Mandrakesoft has a winner here. Mandrakelinux 10.0 is the best Mandrake release yet! My advice to everyone is simple. Install 10.0 Official and decide for yourself. You can download the three CDs from a local mirror, or buy a cheap copy off eBay or from a local CD reseller. It is easy to find, easy to install and well worth a look. Enjoy the reviews. http://www.fatcaterpillar.org/reviews/soft...icial_powerpack http://www.madpenguin.org/Article1040.html http://www.osnews.com/story.php?news_id=6327 (Community) http://www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr/review100.html (Community) http://www.flexbeta.net/main/articles.php?action=show&id=43 (Community) http://www.linuxplanet.com/linuxplanet/reviews/5314/1/ (Community) ====================================================================== AN INTERVIEW WITH ANNE WILSON Anne Wilson is a retired school teacher from the United Kingdom. Anne first encountered a computer in 1968 on a tour of a British Steel factory in Sheffield whilst she was at teachers college. She bought her first computer, a Sinclair Spectrum with 48K of RAM in 1986, and has been hooked ever since. Anne agreed to sit down and talk to me about her Mandrake Linux adventure, the Mandrake Community Twiki. MOUSEMATT: Why Mandrakelinux? When did you start with Linux? Which version did you start with? What version do you use now? Do you belong to MandrakeClub? ANNE WILSON: One day my son-in-law started showing me UNIX running on Windows - all command-line stuff, but it caught my interest. Then a magazine gave away a copy of Red Hat 5 and I decided to try it. It was ill-fated. I got the dial-up Internet connection working, but neither my scanner nor printer would work, and without a printer I'm lost, so the idea went on a back-burner. ANNE WILSON: Nothing more happened until I saw Mandrake 7 on a disk. I struggled for a while, but again came up against hardware problems. Then, when I found Mandrake 8.0 I also found the mailing lists. 8.1 came out very shortly after that, and at that point I started spending more time with it. At some point during 8.2 I made the big switch, only booting to Windows when I needed Something I just couldn't find in Linux. ANNE WILSON: My main box runs 9.1. I kept meaning to upgrade to 9.2, but when everything is working there doesn't seem much point. Also, I do some DTP for my daughter, and use a Windows program for that, so I run Win4Lin, under KDE. ANNE WILSON: I've been a Silver member of the club for 2 years now. I have recently installed Mandrake 10 Official via BitTorrent. It is installed on a new box that I want to use mainly for video-editing, and I'm spending a lot of time playing with that. MOUSEMATT: You are one of the most active contributors to the Mandrake Linux Community TWiki Project: what is the TWiki project all about? ANNE WILSON: The idea of the TWiki grew out of the problems that many of us had with supermount. Some of us felt that we could help Mandrake by trying to get together information about systems where supermount did or didn't work. The idea was too ambitious - we were not ready for it - but the idea that we, as users, could help the distro prosper had been sown. ANNE WILSON: Around a year later someone remarked on how much list time and space went on answering a few questions over and over, and wondered what we could do about it. Someone with Wiki experience suggested a shared space for swapping information, but many felt that it could not work. Maybe the information would be inaccurate. Maybe no-one would bother to post any. Eventually we convinced Vincent Danen that it was well worth a try. ANNE WILSON: MandrakeSoft had real worries about the idea. If they sponsored the idea they would have a legal responsibility for the information that appeared there, yet they would have no control. Unsurprisingly, that was not an acceptable situation. Vincent argued strongly for us, and eventually MandrakeSoft said that we could try it, using their logo etc., providing we made sure that the front page carried a specific statement that the site was user-maintained, and not in any way sponsored by MandrakeSoft. ANNE WILSON: TWiki only works if people take the trouble to post information. Some feel daunted, thinking that it is yet another language to learn in order to post, but the language is very simple for most purposes. Adding to an existing page is the ideal way to get started, as you can look at previous entries to see how they have achieved the formatting that you need. If you need to add a lot of information and don't want to bother learning thelanguage you can use the basic html tags. As long as you stick to simple ones they will work on a TWiki page. ANNE WILSON: Apart from that, the two main problems are getting enough people to add information and publicising the TWiki's existence. The second one was tackled by several of us using a reference to the TWiki page in our email signatures. The url for the TWiki is not particularly easy to remember, so one contributor gave us space on his website for a redirect page. The URL for the Mandrake Twiki is http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org. MOUSEMATT: Do you believe Mandrake is good enoough for the home, school or business desktop? What is your advice to a new user? ANNE WILSON: I think Mandrake is a very good and attractive distro. In a way, beginners using Linux is like using PCs in the days of DOS, where the end user did not expect to be able to do everything himself. What I would recommend is that a regular user sets up the system initially to do exactly what the user most needs. Once they are happy with that, and that shouldn't be long, then a wish-list could be tackled, adding a little at a time. ANNE WILSON: Support for the beginner is the real problem. For a long time now we have had the situation where friends and neighbours can give support to a first-time Windows user, but this is not usually the case with Linux as yet. What would be really nice is a magazine that builds the confidence of newbies. The few current magazines are all far too technical for that task. "Growing up" with a magazine is a great way of gaining confidence, but I suppose the real problem is the range of choice in Linux... We have to make sure that we fight the elitist attitudes whenever necessary if we are to help others gain the freedom we enjoy. MOUSEMATT: Anne Wilson, thankyou so much for your time. The URL for the Mandrake Community Twiki is http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org ====================================================================== NEWBIES: FIVE SMART THINGS TO DO AFTER INSTALLATION Have you just successfully installed Mandrakelinux? Are you staring at a brand new Galaxy desktop wondering what to do next or where to go for help, guidance or just plain fun? If you have been paying attention, you will already have bookmarked the Mandrake Community Twiki (http://twiki.mdklinuxfaq.org). Below are five more smart hyperlinks that will make your Mandrake adventure a lot easier and more enjoyable. #1 Setup URPMI - http://www.urpmi.org/easyurpmi URPMI is Mandrake's package management tool. It is extremely easy to use and makes installing thousands of extra applications and software updates almost completely painless. To setup URPMI properly follow the prompts at: http://www.urpmi.org/easyurpmi/ If you want to save the bandwidth don't mind CD swapping, don't select a "main" mirror and use the compressed index. To install software using URPMI either use the Install Software tool in the Mandrake menu or open a console and type (as root) urpmi package name URPMI will take care of the rest. Don't forget to setup the contrib, updates and PLF mirrors. You will need them all if you'd like to have a lot of fun with Mandrakelinux. #2 Join MandrakeClub - http://www.mandrakeclub.com 90% of Mandrakelinux users download and install it for free. This is 100% legal and perfectly okay. However, there are some advantages to joining MandrakeClub - it shows Mandrakesoft that you like their product and you'd like to financially contribute to its future. Moreover, the club mirrors contain a lot of commercial software that isn't easilly available elsewhere. These include the commercial NVIDIA and ATI graphics drivers, and RPMS for Lucent, Connexant and Alcatel dialup and ADSL modems. Moreover, Mandrakesoft now releases all of their software to Club members before they release them to the general public. Memberships start from USD 60 per year. Please give MandrakeClub some thought... #3 Join the Mandrake Users Board - http://www.mandrakeusers.org This is the largest Mandrakelinux discussion forum on the Internet. It is free to register and a great place to get free help with Mandrakelinux. If you don't want to join the Club this is the next best thing. I would strongly recommend you have a look at this website. #4 Get counted! - http://counter.li.org How many Linux users are there worldwide? How many live in your country, city or state? Its a great idea to take part in this online census: it allows the Linux community to measure its size and use this information to encourage hardware and software companies to improve Linux support. Why shouldn't every Linux user be counted? #5 Remember Google - http://www.google.com/linux If you are searching for Linux specific stuff try surfing to google.com/linux. It is a penguin specific search engine for Linux users. I've often found it does a better job hunting down software and hardwarwe errors, rpms and message archives from user groups. ====================================================================== I WANT TO PLAY... WHAT DO I NEED TO URPMI? I'm assuming you have correctly set up URPMI properly and have access to the contrib and Penguin Liberation Front (PLF) mirrors. If you don't have them working please configure them with Easy URPMI first. QUESTION: I want to play quicktime movies with my linux web browser This is easy enough to setup. Load the Install Software utility. Enter your administration password and find and install the following "mplayer" and "mplayerplugin". A list of extra packages will pop up - install them as well - they include the realplayer, windows media and quicktime. The utility will then download and install mplayer and the necessary plugins from the PLF. It also might be an idea to search and install "kmplayer" - it provides a pretty KDE front end to MPlayer that is a lot easier to use. Once you have finished, exit the software install utility and load your favorite browser. In my case this is Mozilla Firefox or Opera. Then surf to http://www.apple.com/trailers and have a look what's coming to theaters. Enjoy! If you have a question to ask or would like to volunteer to look after this section please email me at mousematt at webace dot com dot au. ====================================================================== DESKTOP ARTWORK FOR THIS ISSUE The Nuvola icon theme is a great addition to any KDE desktop. In fact, I prefer it to the default crystal icon set. If you would like to see it or download it - please follow this hyperlink: http://www.kde-look.org/content/show.php?content=5358 I'd also like to recommend you check out The Art of Greg Martin. Greg produces some great starscapes that make wonderful wallpapers. I really think they add a polished touch to my desktop. View some of his work at: http://gallery.artofgregmartin.com/ If you have a something spectacular you'd like to recommend - please email the hyperlink to me at mandrakemag at webace dot com dot au. Also, if someone would like to volunteer to look after this section please volunteer via email. ====================================================================== CONTRIBUTE AND CONTACT INFORMATION You are nearly at the end of the first issue of MandrakeMag. What do you think? Please send any feedback to me at mandrakemag at webace dot com dot au. I am sorry this issue has been released a few days late - life happens! The second edition of MandrakeMag was published via email on Thursday, 01 July 2004. It will be available on the MandrakeMag website on Wednesday, 07 July. The second issue contains: - a message from mousematt - thankyou harry! - a quick review of mandrakemove 2 - missing market: what mandrakesoft has to learn from suse 9.1 - columnists wanted - no more disk swapping: a tutorial by harry phillips - manually partitioning 98/ME and installing 10.0 (by harry phillips) - installing gimp 2.0 with urpmi - four quick links to get extra software for your mandrake desktop - three great linux strategy games - the mandrake 10.1 roadmap Thanks for reading. Please consider subscribing to MandrakeMag. Remember it's free! Continue your Mandrakelinux adventure. Bye for now! mousematt ====================================================================== PRIVACY STATEMENT: MandrakeMag respects your privacy! Any and all information collected at this site will be kept strictly confidential and will not be sold, reused, rented, loaned, or otherwise disclosed. Any information you give to MandrakeMag will be held with the utmost care, and will not be used in ways that you have not consented to. If you have any questions, please don't hesitate to contact MandrakeMag.

I've recently launched an old-style plain text ezine called MandrakeMag. It's targeted at new Mandrake desktop users. It's site URL is: http://mandrakemag.tux.com.au Please add me :unsure: Added - LiquidZoo

Depends how you define difference. Both are european-developed linux dstributions that use kernel 2.6 and KDE 3.2 as their default desktop. Both have highly polished default themes and powerful system administrationt tools: SUSE has YAST, Mandrakelinux has Mandrake Control Centre. I'd argue SUSE is a more commercial product thn Mandrake. The 5 Disc SUSE 9.1 PRO pack contains a lot of software, the 1 disk personal edition doesnt contain anywhere near as much. There were some terms and conditions regarding redistributing SUSE but they seem to have gone away. Mandrake has URPMI - SUSE doesn't. It's tool YOU is not as powerful as URPMI, however it is possible to use APT4RPM. There is no equivalent of Mandrakeclub for SUSE. There also doesn't appear to be as many third party RPMS for SUSE 9.1 - although a lot of KDE is developed on SUSE first and foremost. It's really muchness for muchness. Which one do you prefer? I have used both extensively and settled on Mandrake. It's really up to you.

I work for a small accounting firm in Western Australia. We are now using Mandrake 10.0 on some of our desktop workstations. Gnucash is probably good enough for a lot of small business bookkeeping but you might want to think about buying CrossOver Office (http://www.codeweavers.com) and running Quicken 2002 with that. Assuming you prefer Quicken to Gnucash. If you are going to GnuCash, I'd suggest you go to gnucash.org and study the user manual. It's a long heavy read but it does reveal most of the functions in GnuCash. They aren't always that obvious. You can also plug GnuCash into a postgreSQL database. There should be a Mandrake RPM for that somewhere. If I can find it I will post a link to that very soon. Depending on the size and scope of your business you might want to try: there is a good list of open source business apps at http://cbbrowne.com/info/financefreesoft.html My advice would be stick with Gnucash. It will do the job nicely... It's just a shame it is so butt ugly!

did u set eslrahc up as a URPMI repository or just download the RPMS?

If you'd really like to run Mandrake I suggest you use the XFCE4 Window environment and a ROX/XFCE4 desktop. This is a GTK2 based DE like GNOME but it is much faster. It doesnt need to drag Nautilus around with it: its simplified and much friendlier for a kiosk. My grandparents desktop environment is XFCE4... they can't break it and you can set it to be task based like OS X. http://www.xfce.org <- give it a go!

I've been using PC Chips Integrated boards for a few years. They are one of my favourite cheap and cheerful hardware suppliers. I have built a half dozen PCs with these boards and run Linux on them exclusively. The only thing that I have never got to work is the serial port on one older mainoard. It was a Socket 370 but on the same SiS 620 - PC CHIPS LMRT 810 chipset. I like them. I'd use them... although they are really small and can be a bit fiddly to work with, ie. cards fit but cover CD-Audio connector etc... I'd still buy one though!

Thankyou for the info. I simply didn't pick it in the URPMI options list. I blame my poor eyesight and the fact I am preparing for one too many exams. EIther way, thanks for the help. I like it when people answer stupid questions with limited sarcasm... Thanks :-)

Is there anyway to stop URPMI from deleting the packages it downloads after it installs them? I have three PCs, an iBook and finite bandwidth. Is there a way I can cache the rpms I download throw URPMI? If I could, I could then just copy them onto the other machine and rpm -Uvh *rpm. :D Has anyone done this? I know you can do it with APT and Red Carpet. It must be possible with URPMI. How do I do it? Thankyou in advance everyone...

If you'd like a durable distribution I'd recommend Mandrakelinux. The one thing I consider really important when playing with Linux on your primary desktop is patience. If you don't know how to do something or something doesnt work right - rather than just fiddle until you break it - share your problem and invite others to share what they know... Just my AUD 0.02 (USD 0.0140)

After much considering and pondering: and the fact that I now have this iBook staring in front of me: I have decided to install Yellow Dog 3.01 IF I find Jaguar too unusable on this machine. Thankyou everyone for your adivce. I hope Mandrake 10.1 is PPC :-)

Gentoo eh? Whats a rough estimate on installation time? I have considered Gentoo before except at the time it was on a P266... need I say more? :-) Any G3 Gentoo Mac users here? This machine was free, I really wanna put it to good use... :-) Thanks for your continuing counsel fissy

It's more a question of will Linux work on this machine at all. I have used OS X quite a bit: it's alright but somewhat overrated imho. Thanks for the input though.

An Apple iBook is about to fall into my lap. Not the new tiny kind - but the older and curvier G3 variety... Does anyone have any experience running Linux on one of these? What's it like? This machine will have a G3 366, 192MB of RAM, OS 10.2 and a 10GB disk. No exotic peripherals - should I even bother with Linux? I welcome your thoughts... Ta!

There are a couple of other financial packages under development. KMyMoney2 is a KDE version of MS Money. It's still in early development and has a few bugs - and a few missing functions - namely printing... but it might be worth a look. http://kmymoney2.sourceforge.net

The real question for me has always been what's so great about .DEB files? In the end it is really just a binary tarball with some metadata included with it. If you run a DEB distro without APT its just as bad as an RPM distro without Yum, APT, YOU, URPMI or RedCarpet. And given that APT and YUM and URPMI are now bundled with most RPM distros with their ability to resolve dependencies: the question remains - whats so great about DEB files? mousematt is :mdk: powered. r u?

I use both of the Mozilla Browsers packaged for Mandrake 10.0 (Mozilla 1.6 and Firefox 0.8) as well as Konqueror. For some reason GTK2 Mozilla apps seem really slow to load and slow to use on my desktop (KDE 3.2 with NVIDIA). So, I am finding Konqueror to be a lot faster - and given the fact that Apple's Safari browser is KHTML: I have a hunch I won't be needing Mozilla much longer. I like Konqueror but I like KDE.

You'd like it to look like OS-X then? What desktop are you using GNOME or KDE? It's probably esaier to make GNOME look just like OS X - but it is possible with both. I am a KDE person and have an OS X theme somewhere. I'll post a few links for KDE in a few minutes once I've put them together... Oh and welcome aboard. :-)

Go to "Configure your Desktop" > Under Sound > Sound System Check that its enabled in the General tab Check that Autodetect or Alsa are selected in the Hardware tab. Have a fiddle here - do you get sound? Remember to close your sound app - XMMS or whatever it is - between goes... Also: I realised my error. XMMS-alsa is a seperate package in 10.0CE. I'd recommend you install that as well. Third disk I think. mousematt

what program are you trying to load? is it XMMS? Stupidly, XMMS still defaults to use the OSS Sound System: which isnt installed - hence no sound. In the case of XMMS - change the Output plugin it to ALSA in the Preferences menu. That solved the problem on a number of different machines. Although, noen of them had your exact sound card.