Archive for the ‘Mandrake Linux’ Category

Mandrake Powerpack 10.0 on Dell Inspiron 4150

Thursday, October 28th, 2004

Installed Mandrake PowerPack 10.0 on Dell Inspiron 4150.

Specs are <>

Performed an “everything” install.

Allowed it to autopartition.

Filesystem Type Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on

/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part1 ext3 5.8G 3.5G 2.1G 64% /

/dev/ide/host0/bus0/target0/lun0/part6 ext3 31G 38M 31G 1% /home

The NIC – 3Com – was detected.

ATI Display card – with 1600 x 1200 – resolution worked fine.

GNOME worked fine !! which hadn’t worked under Slackware 10.0

Slackware used Gnome 2.4 – which was I guess the latest.

I installed Slack on 3 different machines and 2 different options – normal and expert, but still Gnome would not work. It would load the desktop but no background, Terminal would come up, but not Nautilus.

Wireless Card – Hotplug worked. Network config through the wizard worked fine.

Had to change the SSID for the WLAN.

Driver: Orinoco_cs

USB Mouse as well as the PS/2 touchpad both worked together and alone.

Battery Monitor – in Gnome – worked fine.

Shutting the lid, would put the system in standby and bring it back up without any problems.

Windowmaker, XFCE, all worked fine.

I had not installed KDE, so no idea about KDE.

Menus in MDK 10.0 are much much better than what I had seen in 9.2.

Much better organized, fewer options in each category.

Sound – worked out of the box – ALSA

(Donno the sound card, think it is AC’97)

Pleasant Surprise – Audacity was installed :)

Also, Kdenlive was installed – havent had a chance to try it out.

CDROMs are automounted – nice, has been a MDK feature.

an icon appears on the desktop.

USB Drives – work …..although they do not automount. I suppose this

can be set in /etc/fstab.

Not so pleasant things:

XMMS was not installed :-o

Totem has such a stupid interface for Playlists.

Windows key not mapped to Gnome menu.

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Mandrake Powerpack – arrived (or rather picked up)

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Finally….My Mandrake Powerpack CDs arrived. Actually they arrived on Fri, I was at school and the UPS people wouldn’t leave it with anyone (except me!). So……I went and picked it up at the local UPS office.

Now that I have the CDs, I am wondering if re-installing the OS (just retaining my /home) would make things okay…

and what about the updates I have done? Obviously they will get wiped out. If I dont format the partitions, will they be still there or overwritten. Hmm…Overwritten is more like it…

I don’t even remember what updates I did, what commands I tried and got my stuff working….or configured the way I want it…

Looking through the history of the root and my user login to see if I can trace my actions.

Would it be possible to look through the System Logs and figure the same thing out?

Will ask around in the Club and see what they have to say…..

Am tired today…..school..work…the CDs arrived…my turn to cook today….

(Yawn…)

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Screwed up Mandrake pretty bad now…

Tuesday, November 18th, 2003

Well….since I moved over to Linux completely around nov 3rd, I have managed to get (almost!) everything working, most of the time. Its been like this….if A and B worked, C and D wouldnt. (I dint know this at the time). Then all of a sudden, C and D started to work. A also worked, but now B got pissed off by something. Probably by A’s desertion…and sulked.

Had a tough time with B. Coaxed and cajoled and it worked….

SO, for a few days, I had this thing going GREAT!! everything was working….

It was too good to be true, hence I decided that it was no fun.

I tried to update a few things -dont really remember what now -and B went bonkers…..I mean really nuts….no amount of cajoling/coaxing yielded any results…I even threatened to throw it out, but it didnt make any difference. If anything, it made things worse.

Key:

————————————————

A = Network Connections = Ethernet LAN

B = Sound System = Sound Drivers + codecs + Media Player(s) = ALSA, OSS, aRTs + DVD plugins + Xine, Totem

C = Network Connections = Wireless LAN, (never worked even during install and afterward)

D = Touchpad and Mouse playing hide-and-seek

[Coaxing/Cajoling = Trying to find out what configuration files are needed/modified and manually figure out the problem and the solution.

Throw it out = Un-install ]

——————————————

Bottomline:

A = Supposedly been configured for office network, will have to test it tomorrow…er..today (2am now..) and check

B = FUBAR…the only thing that works is XMMS – for audio files and erratic video, The others (Xine, Totem show great video, without any Audio). Both I guess are using the ALSA system and in KDE, aRTs is having control over the driver right now….

C =WLAN funnily working, even hotplugging works

D = removed the external mouse, restarted machine, it detected removal, said OK, rebooted, reinsert ext mouse, got detected, now both work. well 2 out 4 aint bad….so ….

So, this has been a long blog, even longer nights spent on understanding how things worked in the Linux world.

*Yawn* I’ll sign off now with this link – looks like a pretty good site…

Making the big switch – from Windows to Linux – http://www.jediknight.com/~smpoole/switchtolinux.html

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Linux – Yahoo Messenger problems Tried to insta…

Monday, October 20th, 2003

Linux – Yahoo Messenger problems

Tried to install Y! Messenger in Mandrake 9.0 – didnt install…

said failed dependencies – libc.so.6

This had worked earlier in RedHat 9.0. Realised now that the GTK2 (Gnome Toolkit 2) was installed on RH and not in MDK

(MDK 9 is older than RH 9)

so i guess I will have to go about installing the GTK-whatever….or I could just sit tight and wait for my Mandrake 9.2 CDs to come home.

(or maybe I should have that order changed to a DVD…..hmmm??)

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