coverup

That's what I thought too, therefore I can't see how SoulSe's suggestion to silence the router can help. The PC must know the SSID to connect to the network, so even if you the router is silent, the PC will find it 'cause it knows its SSID. My understanding is that the drivers and the network connection manager make sure the wireless NIC connects to a stronger signal. They also run some power management on the card, so if the signal is weak, they drop off connection and try to connect again. I think something similar happens with your network. Are you able to monitor the signal strength? On my router, the signal strength fluctuates substantially. I even had to turn the router side-wise to ensure the antenna pattern is right for the environment.

Pardon my ignorance... Shouldn't the repeater and router have the same SSID?

Repeaters seem to be more expensive and more difficult to setup. Maybe you could try using a high gain antenna.

Kdocker does exactly that - it forces applications to minimise to the system tray.

for KDE you could use kdocker. maybe check out their website for a gnome equivalent? Edit: Apparently, kdocker works with GNOME too; see http://kdocker.sourceforge.net/

In addition to Ian's suggestion, try unchecking both APIC and LAPIC; i.e, boot with noapic, nolapic.

Very much agree...

Nuh, I have only 5.8G for / and other system partitions, not including /home. Peanuts...:-)

Which interface to use is a matter of personal preference.... until things go so wrong that you need to fix or restore configuration files. I found that fixing KDE configuration files is a lot easier than fixing GNOME. Gnome apps store their config in an endless number of xml files, and there is no easy way to locate an important property, unless you are a developer:-). KDE is a lot simpler, IMHO. Each application has one or two config files, which are easy to find and fix 'cause they are named <application>rc, <application>.destop, etc. If you need Gnome just to run a spcific application, the application will run under KDE just fine as long as all libraries are installed. You can just install Gnome for the sake of having all necessary libraries, then applications such as evolution or nautilus will run just fine within KDE.

1. To locate the file /etc/modprobe.preload open terminal, and type: ls /etc/ |grep mod Post the output here. It could be that your installation of Mandrake 10 is still using kernel 2.4.x. Mandrake 10 was the first version using kernel 2.6.x by default, but it may be that in your case the installer had to fall back to the previous version 2.4.x. If that's the case, you should edit /etc/modules. To find out, which kernel is your system using, type uname -r 2. To add anything to those files, open it in editor, and add the line "apm" in the end of the file. E.g. /etc/modprobe.preload should look as follows. # /etc/modprobe.preload: kernel modules to load at boot time. # # This file should contain the names of kernel modules that are # to be loaded at boot time, one per line. Comments begin with # a `#', and everything on the line after them are ignored. # this file is for module-init-tools (kernel 2.5 and above) ONLY # for old kernel use /etc/modules apm 3. The tool you are looking for is called ksnapshot. But you should be able to locate the files using the method described in 1.

Welcome to the board. I run mandrake on ThinkPad T41, so I can try to recall my steps. T23 is a fairly old model (there is nothing wrong with that!), but it may be using a somewhat older power management technology. The first thing to try is to boot linux with some extra parameter. The ones you need to try are nolapic, noapic and/or acpi=off. Open Mandriva Control Center MCC (the icon shows a monitor with a wrench), there will be an entry there called Boot or similar. There you should be able to select whether you want/don't want APIC or local APIC. Clear checkboxes next to those words (that would mean noapic and nolapic). Save and reboot. You should also try different combinations. Post the result here. Perhaps, your screen and videocard can support a higher resolution than the one Mandriva chose for you. Again, there is an entry in the MCC, under hardware, where you can set up/update the graphical server. There are plenty of applications which you can use for web design. Check what you have in the Internet menu. Also, check out software management tools in MCC. The application is called tpb. There are great resources for linux on thinkpads. For instance check out this site http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/walter/geek...0-mandrake.html. There is also a thinkpad-linux maillist (I lost the link, but you can find it on google).

Try to hit Esc, just after the status bar appears, before it hangs (be quick!).

Neither do I. But on a larger scale, if hardware manufacturers will see no/little revenue form non-windows systems, what would be an incentive for them to develop drivers for linux? To make my point, you may remember that many laptop users had a lot of trouble with winmodems. With the invent of broadband internet, the problem has gone away for the majority of home users, but was it resolved?

... and continue support M$'s claim that Vista proudly runs on 99.9% of desktops, because my desktop does not count as a non-Vista one! Edit: and of course in the end of financial year Dell will figure out (for the second time!) that their Linux initiative is not viable, as customers showed little interest in purchasing Linux systems.

KDE is well supported by Ubuntu under the name of Kubuntu. You can install Ubuntu from the CD, and then install KDE via the netweork. This will make both worlds coexist on your HD, just like Mandriva powerpack does.

This advise comes too late, but nonetheless... Try a LiveCD such as Ubuntu first to see if there is a sufficient Linux support for your WiFi card. Ubuntu in particular is very good in this regard.

On the issue of I window/destop managers (IceWM,TWM, etc), as a result of the upgrade one or more of startup scripts, such as /etc/X11/Xsession, /etc/X11/gdm/Xsession, etc. have changed. You may need to respore the original /etc/X11/ directory and compare it with the new one, script by script. Problems with keyboard and mouse could be a result of changed XF86Config. Again, try to resore your original one from the backup.

The options from my lilo.conf relevant to the power-off problem append="nolapic noapic acpi=off"

Do you know what BIOS/model you have? Maybe, send email to the manufacturer of BIOS or box? As I said, this could be a compatibility problem with BIOS. About 3-4 years ago there was quite a bit of noise about ACPI in this and other forums. Many users complained about the poweroff problem similar to yours. I `fixed' my laptop by adding acpi=off to the kernel options, and loading apm instead. I have no problems with power management ever since. It worth trying (but I completely forgot what else I did).

Since your computer is pentium3, are you sure its bios is ACPI-compliant? I suspect your computer is fairly old (not that there is anything wrong with that!) is therefore not (fully) acpi-compliant. Maybe, you could try to use APM on your laptops instead of ACPI as a solution to the problem with poweroff. Ian, same suggestion...

...because the printer is connected to the router and talks to the printserver on the router. Printing to xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx:9100 will only work if your printer has its own ethernet card and is assigned an IP address xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx. Since your printer is connected to the router/printsevrer, you should print to the lpd queue on the server. Fire up MCC, select printers (or whatever the name) -> add printer -> connection type -> printer on the remote lpd server -> Remote host name 192.168.0.1 (the router's IP address), remote printer name lp. Works for me

Port replicators are not always friendly. My PR does not allow me to use my DVI LCD monitor in dual/clone mode, it's either the monitor or laptop. Install Linux on the laptop undocked, then dock the laptop, exit the graphic mode to console and try to configure X again using Xdrake or Xorg configuration tools. A good idea is to backup the original xorg.conf and XF86Config files. If new configuration works, you are lucky. If it doesn't, then you will have to manually edit xorg.conf, e.g., add monitor/screen/layout/input device sections, etc. You will have to learn some stuff about Xorg, but this is not a rocket science and there are many examples you can learn from. A good thing is that if you do it from the console, you can always restore the original configuration (if you made a backup of course).

Correct, but the script must somehow find out which X profile needs to be loaded. If there were a way to autodetect the number and type of monitors connected from within a bash script, that would be easy, but I am not aware of such a thing.

One way of switching from one xorg.conf to another is by setting up several boot profiles in lilo. You can create two boot profiles in /etc/lilo.conf and add PROFILE=profile1 and PROFILE=profile2 to the append insruction. You must run the command lilo -v as root every time you change lilo.conf. It is then possible to poll the current profile from /etc/rc.local by looking at the content of the file /etc/netprofile/current and change the content of xorg.conf accordingly. You don't even need to change the file itself, symlinking xorg.conf to xorg.conf.dual_screen or xorg.conf.internal_lcd should do the trick. Check the location of all files mentioned before you start doing anything, they might be in a different location or have a different name - my system is not the latest one.

ExtFS2 Anywhere from Paragon Software works quite reliably for me. Only problems I encountered were (1) restoring form suspend to disk was not always clean; (2) MS office screwed files when writing to ext3 directly, but saving to the NTFS partition and then copying files across always works fine; (3) After crash (a totally unrelated thing, the ATI driver and the mouse not always get along), you should always first recover journal before booting to Windows. Not that I still use version 2.5 which has been superseded with more advanced versions.