scarecrow

Yes, not necessarily true, but better being safe than sorry. And anyway, Mandriva Italian (International ?) Backports (MIB) is sort-of-trusted repository, so it should be preferred, IMO.

Apparently the script must be run as root. But I have to warn you: Do NOT install stuff which is outside your distro's PMS. You will bork your system beyond repair. BTW the current version of Truecrypt is 7.0a, and it's almost sure that it's included in a Mandriva repository. It may be called "realcrypt", as there is a lisencing issue with truecypt and some distros have rebranded it. You can also use dm-crypt/LUKS encryption instead, which is included in the Linux kernel. EDIT: Truecrypt 7.0 has been packaged and distributed by MIB. http://mib.pianetalinux.org/MIB/

With 4GB RAM you should not bother having a swap partition at all- it's higly unlikely that you'll ever need it. But you can put a very small one in there (say 256 MB) purely for cosmetic reasons. The only case in which you should need a big swap file, is the case you have a laptop, and want to suspend to disk. In that case, swap is used by default for storing the suspended data, so your swap should be slightly bigger than the physical RAM size. In any other case, you should opt for a tiny swap, or no swap at all.

The actual message translation should be "Partition 1 does not end on cylinder boundary", as you already mentioned. This is rather particular to fdisk (does not seem to like partitions not ending in cylinder boundaries), but IMO there's nothing wrong with your partition table, and you shouldn't worry. /dev/sda1 is the "system reserved" win7 partition, /dev/sda2 the actual partition on which win7 are installed. The rest are OK, excluding the swap size, which is huge (approx. 2.8GB, if you used the defaults for block size when creating the partition, while with some moderate RAM size one fifth of that should be perfectly adequate), which you can reduce to save some HD space. In short: Proceed installing, and when asked at the end of the installation, put grub in the MBR ( /dev/sda ) It should pick and offer the option to boot win7 automatically. If not, fixing grub's configuration is not difficult at all.

No, I actually do mean "unfortunately", a bit sarcastically, as at most I would use XP for my work. Seven are close to OK, but unnecessarily and incredibly bloated, while Vista were the worst flavor of windows, ever. Best way to give us a view of your HD layout: open a root console (kdesu konsole) and type in fdisk -l What's the output?

Installing converted packages, or RPM's from other distributions in your system, has a name. It's called "breaking the PMS of my distribution". Never, ever do that, even if you are an experienced user. Chances to completely bork your system are great.

No, unfortunately it doesn't. :D Unless you have some laptop with weird partition table (e.g. with a hidden recovery partition in some proprietary/raw filesystem) there should be no issues, and in any case the "troublemaker" should be the new HD partition table, and not grub itself. The extra partition windows seven are creating by default (regularly showing as "system reserved" in windoze partition manager) should be no problem at all, if you know what you're doing during partitioning.

If your "audio" disks do not have the audioCD logo stamped on them, then they are probably not redbook-compliant audioCD's, but rather protected mixed mode data CD's. These CD's can't be ripped by typical audio rippers- they need special techniques.

I've applied in that forum, too. Very little is happening here the last couple of months.

AFAIK the Powerpack repos include prorietary and commercial packages... so, no, it's quite unlikely to find the opensource wxcam in there.

Open dolphin or konqueror, and type in the address bar audiocd:/ kaudiocreator isn't such a good software- I suggest instead either rubyripper (natively) or Exact Audio Copy (via wine). Both are working mighty fine.

NEVER, EVER use such files on your Linux distro. It's almost sure you will break it beyond repair. Always use your distro's PMS. It's about 99.9% sure that if there ***IS*** a driver for your wi-fi, you will find it there.

You can give it a try in VirtualBox, and if it's OK for you, then go on. I wouldn't say that Arch is a geek distro, but it's not plain sailing, either: The only "system control center" is the console (OK, you can also install webmin if you like...), all the official management tools are run from the console, initscripts are more similar to BSD than other Linux distros, services have no runlevels, everything is updated before even you got some time to install it... and so on :P But on the other hand, it's a pure rolling distro (install and configure properly once, and then forget), and it leaves you absolute control over any system aspect.

Apparently initrd was not built properly. Boot with .26 and reinstall .27, tracking all installation errors.

Actually "yaourt" is a pacman wrapper, which has the virtue of automatically parsing build scripts (PKGBUILDS), taking care of the missing dependencies, downloading the sources, compiling and outputting the final package. Such complex scripts are "dirty" in principle, but you will be amazed by the ease of the installation procedure- most of the times it's just typing the above, and nothing more than that. It's quite similar to Gentoo's emerge, but the structure of the PKGBUILD is much, much simpler (pure BASH).

wxcam could, and should be present at the official Mandriva repos, for a simple reason: It's much superior to cheese, under any aspect. It's compilation from source is rather tricky, though. Under Archlinux it is as simple as running "yaourt -Sy wxcam" in a console window, but under Mandy it does need a bunch of -devel packages (libglade, mjpegtools, perlxml, wxgtk, xvidcore) plus version 1.3.4 of the CImg library.

kdesu is pretty standard command for virtually any distro. You can exclude Kubuntu and spinoffs, where kdesu has been replaced by kdesudo.

No, I am not talking about the bugfest named gimpshop (R.I.P.). I'm talking about the regular, official gimp. Gimp devs have stubbornly rejected for years the requests for single window mode in Gimp (Photoshop-alike). Now on the devel version of Gimp (currently 2.7.1) the single window mode is embedded in the program. It does start the traditional Gimp way, but you can pick single window mode from the "Window" menu anytime you like. While at first I was excited by this feature, I do have to say that a) the devel version of Gimp is still quite buggy, and B ) I am so used at working in Gimp in multiple window mode, that I have hardly used the new mode up to now. Oh well... :P Release announcement Changelog [moved from Software by spinynorman]

The binary .deb is here: http://ftp.debian.org/debian/pool/contrib/n/nspluginwrapper/nspluginwrapper_1.3.0-1_amd64.deb This can be unpacked using several tools (e.g. deb2rpm or deb2targz) The binaries are (AFAIK) statically built, so it's not likely to have dependency hell. Now you can simply enter the unpacked directory, and copy as root the included files to the corresponding system directories (should be OK for Mandy). Generally it's not advisable to install binaries like that: it may break your distro's PMS, with unpredictable consequences. But if you keep a track of those non-PMS system changes, you can easily revert them in case something goes wrong.

The most advanced nspluginwrapper, as well as the best working currently, is the one in Debian Sid. It can be used in other Linuxes as well (factly, this is what I'm using on my 64-bit Archlinux) with some footwork. The wrapper works great, but flashplugin itself is as buggy as ever. OK, the huge security gap went away, but that is that: performance and stability-wise there is absolutely no improvement.

Sorry to say that the reasoning in that petition is naive and inconclusive, to say the very least. If you demand A you should say what the specific probems with A are, and not just "PulseAudio does not work". If the petition was put in a more "professional" and logical way, I would gladly sign it, although I do not use either Mandriva, or PulseAudio.

Ummm, isn't 4.4.2 3+ months old? Just try 4.4.5, most (if not all) bugs of the 4.4 milestone squashed.

Do you know which application was used in XP to burn the disk? It should be some application using ISO9660 filesystem plus Joliet extensions. If it was burned using a packet writer, the reading it under Linux is troublesome- or rather not really worth trying.

There are certain xine modules into PLF (although not xine-lib). See here: ftp://ftp.mandrivausers.ro/pub/plf/mandriva/2010.0/free/release/binary/i586/

I ended up using (on Archlinux 64-bit) the 32-bit version of the plugin, plus the Debian implementation of nspluginwrapper. While at times the CPU usage is high-ish, flash works OK- factly much better than the native 64-bit version ever did. And-for the record, 10.0.45.2 is not recommended due to the serious security hole mentioned on first post.