scarecrow

No 64-bit 10.1, you have to use either nspluginwrapper or gnash.

Anything that's NOT done the same way as under windoze is definitely not "unintuitive". Just different.

What are you using as display manager? KDM, GDM or something else? Is the display manager started via inittab, or it's running as a daemon?

Mount the stick and then as root change the permissions # chmod -R 0777 /media/usbstick (or whatever mount point it posesses). I cannot find a good reason to have a journaling filesystem in USB sticks. ext2 should be a better choice.

Sad, but... expected. IMO it's very difficult to sell the business under the current conditions. They will likely fold and file something compliant to the French bankruptcy law.

You could switch your repos to Cooker: http://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.mandriva.com/MandrivaLinux/devel/2010.1/ and then perform a full sysupgrade from init 3. But IMO you should wait a bit until 2010.1 gets frozen in Cooker- unless you are fairly experienced with Mandriva and Linux in general.

I'm managing two Debian Squeeze (AKA testing) servers. I am always updating them via aptitude safe-upgrade, and the upgrade included the kernel (just the one of them, because the other is using a statically built customized kernel made by OVH). Squeeze is IMHO much better that Ubuntu Server because of its rolling nature- it's quite unlikely to break the system by just safe-upgrading. Actually the only thing that worried me was Squeeze going from old good grub to grub2, but fortunately enough grub-legacy is still in the repos, and it will stay there for a long time.

There is no clean way. Some people had success using a windows application named zalternator under WINE, but as mentioned it won't work with newer Zune firmware revisions. The only other way is full OS emulation (VirtualBox/VMWare). This is because of the proprietary, closed format of MTP protocol Microshaft is using on Zune.

I am not really an Amarok fun. Whoever is may try Clementine, which immitates Amarok 1.4.X, but without any KDE dependency (just QT4), while Foobar2000 (arguably the best windoze music manager ever) works just fine under WINE- preferrably with OSS4 instead of alsa.

Nice contrib, thank you. I have also moved to Arch64, from Arch32, and while there are a few regressions, the 64-bit environment is almost mature for everyday desktop usage.

Mandriva is ***NOT*** RHEL. The only thing in common is the RPM packaging system, virtually anything else is VERY different. For getting acquainted to the way packages are installed in Mandriva (and the right way is certainly not yum), have a look at this one: http://zarb.org/~zerodogg/RPM-HOWTO.html

Or, even better, through a debugger: strace -o ~/soerror soffice After the OOo crash, pick the afoprementioned debug file (soerror) and put it anywhere, so we can have a look. Just a warning though, this file can be really BIG.

I have surely included Songbird to my list of the most badly designed bloated/disfunctional software ever, so I wouldn't care less about their drop of support for *nix. Fork it? Whatfor? Bugs shouldn't be forked...

Is there any good reasoning in using a distro which is effectiveley dead since more than two years ago?

The kernel itself shouldn't be responsible. However, there could be a gcc update, and some lib32-something compatibility libs being broken. Try running a few of your segfaulting 32-bit apps like "$ strace -o ~/errorlog programname" strace should be installed of course, and you can also try/install gdb, which cooperates with the KDE4 crash handler. Then, you can pick the full debugging info from the textfile "errorlog" located at the root of your user partition. This logfile can be HUGE.

Root FS can be encrypted using a keyfile, which can either be stored in some network place, or in some USB-stick held by the computer operator. So, this isn't an issue at all. Encryption, while not a bulletproof solution, is still an excellent choice for corporate environments. I'm talking about kernel-based LUKS/dm-crypt filesystem encryption, but there are other effective solutions as well.

31% using Ubuntu? What the bl@@dy F@ck, I thought it was a Linux poll, after all...

Rather an odd piece of advice to give to a Mandriva user! :P KDE 4.4 is simply the best DE ever, and 4.4.1 cured many outstanding bugs. Personally, I only had one issue with KDM (logout/reboot/halt not working properly after upgrade), but the cure was really simple: dleteing kdmrc, and reinstalling KDM. Now, it's working perfectly (using both plain Archlinux/KDE 4.4.1 on my laptop, and Kdemod 4.4.1 on my desktop).

If you want to handle multiple hostnames on the same machine, then the most convenient way is creating virtual network interfaces. Each virtual NIC can handle one hostname. Sorry to say that I can't give any solid tip for Mandriva- I am comfortable with it only using Debian, CentOS and ArchLinux.

Inkscape has a LOT of GNOME dependencies, and so installing a non-backport RPM is highly likely to fail. A safer solution is (as suggested) to install the latest available from backports, or compiling it yourself leaving out all unnecessary GNOME deps.

The openoffice which is stock in Mandriva 2010.0 is actually compiled from the Go-OO branch... but I do not know if all extras are compiled in. http://www2.mandriva.com/linux/features/

GDM in GNOME 2.2.8 is a horrible mess, you shouldn't touch it at all. Just stop the service permanently from CLI, and try to reboot normally in runlevel three, and then run "startx", "startkde" or whatever DE you are using as default.

On single mode, you log in as root. Most probably, graphical mode for root is disabled by default. Since I do not know if you load kdm/gdm as a service, or via inittab, then please login in single mode and then give cat /etc/inittab What's the full output?

If it's burned using a prorietary windoze UDF packet driver (e.g. Ahead inCD, or similar) then it will not show up, unless it's finalized.

Go-oo has plenty of stuff which is not included in vanilla Ooo. Some addons are important, while some other, like mono integration, aren't (at least not for me).