scarecrow

Do you have an /etc/X11/xorg.conf config file, or everything is autoconfigured at startup?

Probably bluefish, buit the choice is ample, and since I'm everything else than a python guru I will decline offering a concrete recommendation.

The size of the swap partition is debatable. Actually there's good reasoning, if you have sufficient RAM (1 GB or more) to limit swap to 256 MB, or even omit swap completely. I have just 256MB on my desktops, while on my laptop I have swap slightly larger than the physical RAM (because I do use sometimes the suspend to disk feature). 10G is fair for root, and for some systems that have heavy net I/O's and for that reason large logfiles, a separate /var partition makes sense.

Currently, almost everyone is pretty happy with either wicd, or networkmanager: Both are working great, and some specific distros have developed reliable third-party wifi management utilities. But neither wicd, nor NetworkManager were mature enough when 2008.0 was out.

Any linux terminal (not just konsole, which is probably the most powerful linux terminal, along with yakuake, which is just another interface for konsole) can run python interactively. And- surely enough, python is a bog standard in ANY Linux distro, not just Mandriva. Open a root console, and give # urpmi python This is just the core of the python language. Python is splitted in many packages in Mandriva- to add things just use Mandriva Control Center (MCC) / Software installer. Do there a query for "python".

XFE4 also uses esd for system sound events. Install esd, and then via mcc/services activate esd to run at system startup, if it's not activated right after installation. I know... esd isn't the perfect sound server by far, but this is what XFCE4 and Gnome are using.

Some sort of bittorrent client running?

I think that if you will need some sort of sound server running. If under gnome, activate and run ESD.

Which videocard is in there? Old nvidia videocards have now no less than three legacy drivers (173, 96xx and 71xx), chances are that the installer picked up the wrong one.

Disable ipv6, like daniewicz suggested, and pin certain DNS server to your netork config- else Mandriva is using the DNS server of the DHCP server. I suggest using the OpenDNS free servers: nameserver 208.67.222.222 nameserver 208.67.220.220 These DNS servers resolve fine and fast for pretty much any site.

In Archlinux the appropriate file for that is /etc/rc.local I don't really know if this is the right place for Debian- Arch may be a regular Linux distro, but it does have a few peculiarities: No init runlevels (just runlevel 3 and runlevel 5) and the initscripts use BSD-like hierarchy rather than Linux one.

NAT can be a royal pain for active FTP filetransfers, but PASV/HTTP should be easier to handle.

~/.xinitrc or, in some cases, ~/.bashrc Or, if you are using a DE with startup manager (KDE4, Gnome, XFCE4...) you can put them right there.

So, you are using NAT? What nameservers are assigned to your router?

Gnome, KDE4 or XFCE?

Don't waste your precious time with the lousy fglrx driver. It's a total pos. The ATi devs are 100% imbecile- there isn't any doubt about that. They had MANY months to create a usable driver with the new xorg releases, and they did less than zero. It ***MAY*** work with the new xorg, the new xorg opensource driver and kernel 2.6.32. All of them will be out in a couple of weeks or so, but still- the best bet is buying an nvidia gpu...

Just a couple, maybe there are more: 1. Use "xdesu dolphin" 2. Configure sudo, add your user to the "wheel" group and then either 'sudo dolphin" or install kdesudo (a standard for kubuntu, but it should also exist for Mandriva) and start the app like "kdesudo dolphin".

Works rather decently here. Using the devel branch from here although the 249 beta is also OK. My main complaint is that they are prebuilt and as such they can't be used with kgtk to get rid of the gtk+ file dialogs for better KDE4 looks. Other than that, they are fast and stable.

The cleanest solution is replacing OpenOffice with Go-Openoffice, and start the latter as $ OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=kde4 soffice And voila, perfect desktop/dialog integration with KDE4. You can export the above string ( OOO_FORCE_DESKTOP=kde4 ) to any startup script you find convenient, so you won't have to type it all the time to Start (Go)Openoffice. It should also help if you had a uniform theme for both KDE4 and gtk+, e.g. qtcurve. For adjusting the gtk+ theme under KDE4, you can use a few graphical apps- I suggest "lxappearance", which is part of LXDE, but completely independent of the rest LXDE modules.

Get a router, and connect via ethernet or wifi. Problem solved. I'd opt for a Linksys, 3-Com or Zyxel router, but these aren't the only reliable brands.

Well, I see several xine modules in PLF, but no xine-lib, so I don't know if the actual one in the main repo is intentionally crippled.

Claws mail is several times better, much more extensible, and faster overall. I don't argue about Firefox (which is resource-heavy, but an excellent browser overall), but Thunderbird is nothing special- just a sub-par email client with nothing significant under its sleeve.

Are you using DHCP or static IP's on the router? If using static (which is always the simpler & cleaner solution): Can you add to the Mandriva box the actual LAN IP's and computer names of the other LAN boxes? You must add them to the file /etc/hosts

Totem will use GIO, no matter if it's fired inside Gnome or not. About Kaffeine, I have no real idea if the backend (likely xine-lib) is crippled or not. Mplayer and vlc from the official repos are surely crippled (compiled with loads of things left out) and they must be replaced by their PLF variations.

This is a GIO bug which comes and goes... but it appeared again in Gnome 2.28 Simply update your Gnome packages, or wait for a proper update, or use VLC or Smplayer to playback.