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Here is a very good laptop reference for Mandrake users.

May I humbly suggest an article of mine on that topic?

Regards

b.

and the correct MandrakeUser link.

• My question: Windows XP has been out there for what, a year? It took people that long to realize that the license agreement disallows the use of VNC?

I use the Windows 2000 Boot Loader and it works fine if I dual boot with Windows 2000 and RedHat 7.2 or Windows2000 and Windows 98SE. But once I try to use Win2k, Win98, and Linux it screws up. Everytime I boot in Win98 it says the 'Registry is damaged' and performs a long scan disk.

Now I just use the Win2k boot loader for Win2k and Win98, and I use a linux boot floppy for loading into Linux. Certainly one of the most annoying errors I get with Linux (and computers in general) are the ones nobody else gets. Of course, Linux is lucky to have strong user base who are involved in many chat rooms, message boards, and mailing lists that some guy in Taiwan may have the same problem as you did and found a way to fix it.

Maybe you should tell people in the Mandrake Community about the bug. Perhaps a messageboard?

my mother doesn't even see much difference between KDE in Windows mode and Windows

Okay, what's your secret? I cannot get the base (as opposed to accelerated) speed of the mouse cursor to a decent level in X (KDE/RH7.1), and the only FAQ question I've found about it basically admits as much.

If Linux is ever going to take over large chunks of the desktop market, I think it will be because of some radically and snazzy different new design that that by pure chance catches fire and becomes a fad.

I just had this conversation in another thread. This need not be an accident; one of the desktop projects (or an entirely new one, God help us) needs to tap the best thinking on alternative paradigms (heh heh--I said 'paradigms') for user interface and do something different and EFFECTIVE.

You don't mention which distribution you are using... I noticed that on one of the Mandrake forums someone had found that setting nobiospnp fixed the problem on their KT266A system.

WindowMaker runs fine on my 486, as will blackbox, AfterStep, bare Sawfish and the rest. Depending on what you want to do, you may want to try an older distribution instead -- Redhat 5.2 or something like that. Everything in it will be a lot lighter weight so it will be easier than trying to cut a recent distro down to size. KDE 1.x will run faster on that box than KDE 2 does on a 800 MHz system. You can still update all the console stuff to new versions with no loss of performance.

Until nVidia offers them, you can get them via MUO.

tom (mandrakesoft)

For more info on Mandrake's tools, MandrakeUser.org has a page about urpmi:
http://www.mandrakeuser.org/docs/basics/brpm3.html

The Linux-Mandrake website has a chapter about the Software Manager, which is a front-end to urpmi:
http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/demos/Spotlight/S oftwareMgr/

http://mandrakeforum.com

This is the general news forum and discussion board for Mandrake, it contains (or will contain, the format just changed) all the announcements and discussions for ALL the Mandrake sites. There are links on the left to the sites you want:

http://www.mandrakeuser.org

This is meant to have all the knowledge base articles for Mandrake. It seems to be down at the moment, but it does have a section on networking from what I remember.

http://mandrakecampus.com

This is the free Linux training site, and it provides instructions on setting up Mandrake for both desktop and server stuff. This does have a section on NFS setup and the like. If neither of these sites fix your specific problem there is:

http://mandrakeexpert.com

This is a combination knowledge base/expert question-answer site. You can post problems and other questions and find an expert to answer them.

If all else fails there are two Mandrake mailing lists available (newbie and expert) and you can try to post your problem as an article to MandrakeForum too.

G'D Luck!

"I'll take the red pill, no, blue. AAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH........"

There are simple newbie-friendly instructions to do this at mandrakeuser.org

Antialiasing and hinting under those desktops are a totally different matter entirely, but at least the fonts are prettier than those horrible T1 fonts (I know there are some beautiful T1 fonts, but those are very expensive to get).

------
C'mon, flame me!

I've put a tarball of this compile on my MandrakeUser.Org site. Just unpack and run the 'konq' binary. It's pretty good, actually, although as basic as you can get.

tom, tom@mandrakeuser.org

--

I'm currently updating my own MandrakeUser.Org for the new stuff in 7.2. Soon, there will be an article by Till on using CUPS.

Official documentation for 7.2 will be available online, of course.

The newsgroup is alt.os.linux.mandrake

Mailing lists (English, French, Italian, German). Most of them are archived at mail-archive.com (links on the same page).

Good luck ;-)

tom, MandrakeUser.Org

--

tom, MandrakeUser.Org

--

I second that. If your hardware is marginal or faulty, you will have problems, no matter what you're running.

Here's my horror story...

For those who are interested in my system specs:

Athlon 500 Processor
Gigabyte GA-7IX mainboard
128M PC100 Ram (single DIMM)
ATI All-in-Wonder 128 AGP
2 9.1 GB SCSI HDs
LS120 IDE drive
SB Live! Value PCI
Linksys 10/100 Eathernet NIC PCI
Adaptec 2940U2W SCSI PCI
USR 56K Voice Faxmodem Pro Ext.
Pioner 6X/32X SCSI DVD-ROM

OS is Mandrake Linux 7.0-2

Long story short...

First mainboard turned out to be DOA out of the box. Second mainboard appeared to be OK, but, after a couple of weeks in operation, the system started crashing...

Here's how bad it was; the crashes were the nasty ones where the system would completely lock-up, and could only be recovered by the L Alt-SysRq song-and-dance. Unfourtunitly, it doesn't always work...

Sometimes the crashes were random, but some of the crashes occoured after certian events (ex. loading a >1MB file to/from the LS120 drive, heavy disk/IO activaty under certian conditions). It even crashed, with a kernel panic, durning an fsck! Meraculessly, the system survived, I was able to repair it, and it's still working (for better or worse), I,m typing this post on it right now. And the crashes left no clues in the system logs (you know that you have a defianate hardware problem if that happens).

Hardware problems are the most diffacult to diagnose, especialy if you don't have hardware testing equiptment, and I know that through painful experance.

I latter determined that the problem was the mainboard, or, more spificly, the mainboard IO bridge. I didn't think it was phyicaly possable, but this sucks, blows, and bites all at the same time.

Rigth now I,m waiting until the replacement MB gets here. Believe me, it's not going to be gigabyte, two bad MBs in a row doesn't inspire confidince in the manufacture's quality control.

Anybody have any thoughts on Tyan's Athlon MB? I decieded to go with that MB because of thier reputation, and it doesn't have these awfull windows-only fetures (ex. AMR slot).

Well, OTOH there is the rise of distributions like Corel Linux, which 'feature' security holes so big you could get an elephant through them...

Regards

tom

P.S.: Oh, and by the way, spend my website a visit if you need help with LM ;-)

--

Motif set about to capture the 'visual elegance' of Windows (pre-95), and has been stuck there ever since. The stupid drop-down fly-out menus (as opposed to drop down - scroll) Motif has are grounds enough for shooting someone. Motif does not "provide a GUI for Unix applications" -- it makes UNIX look retarded! It says, "Warning! This system is unusable! Try your toaster instead!"

http://yawara.anime.net/gaijinFAQ/n etscape.html
It being the case that Motif sucks beyond belief, and that Netscape Navigator uses Motif, you basically have to maim it to let it display Japanese in things like the Menu-bar, Bookmarks, and Forms.

http://www.catalog.com/hopkins/ simcity/keynote.html
It wouldn't have been possible to port SimCity to X11 using Open Software Foundation's Motif toolkit. It just absolutely sucks. It's not open, and you have to pay for the source code, and it's not being maintained.

http://www.mandrakeuser.org/connec t/cbrowse.html
The interface sucks. It is built with the legacy Motif library.

http://shadowrun.html.com/ubb /Forum2/HTML/000007.html
And I programmed in C/X-windows/Motif for ten years. The most far away I can stand from that monster, the happier I am :)

http://www.motifzone.com/resources/sta rt.htm
Let's face it, X/Motif are sophisticated pieces of system software with lots of flexibility and power.

http://slashdot.org/articles/99 /03/01/0644222.shtml
I'm a professional X11 programmer, and GTK+ is one of the nicest widget sets about. Combined with GNOME it has the potential to beat even the object frameworks produced by Less Palatable Companies. For people who have never done professional X11 programming, Motif is CRAP. Everybody hates it. It was designed by a committee, and damn it shows. There's a reason it's called Bloatif. Even the addon packages to make Motif more usable (by giving it workable file dialogs, tree views, and a drag and drop you don't have to implement 90% by hand) are buggy, slow and memory hungry.

http://slashdot.org/books/99/03/22 /0826250.shtml
If it weren't for GTK I'd probably be programming Motif (well, OK, actually I'd be programming in QT, but that's besides the point). Motif is much like raw X Window System calls, except that Motif is MUCH MUCH WORSE! Motif is much like the stinky dead fish that your dog insists on digging up every time you try to throw it away. The world needs more Motif applications like I need a hole in my head. I can go on and on about this. Really, I can. Moral of the story: Learn a toolkit. Believe me on this one. I've made dumber comments, but few have been more true. Just don't do Motif. :^)
[...]
BTW, I agree about Motif. I think it was the worst thing to happen to Unix, ever. I think it did more to harm Unix as a platform than anything else that ever occurred during the 30+ years that Unix has been in existence.
[...]
Motif/Lesstif is arguably worse than gtk, and I programmed a lot of Motif.

If the designers of X-Windows built cars, there would be no fewer than five steering wheels hidden about the cockpit, none of which followed the same principles -- but you'd be able to shift gears with your car stereo. Useful feature, that. - Marus J. Ranum, Digital Equipment Corporation

http://ecco.bsee.swin.edu.au/un ix/uh/x-windows.html
The Motif Self-Abuse Kit
X gave Unix vendors something they had professed to want for years: a standard that allowed programs built for different computers to interoperate. But it didn't give them enough. X gave programmers a way to display windows and pixels, but it didn't speak to buttons, menus, scroll bars, or any of the other necessary elements of a graphical user interface. Programmers invented their own. Soon the Unix community had six or so different interface standards. A bunch of people who hadn't written 10 lines of code in as many years set up shop in a brick building in Cambridge, Massachusetts, that was the former home of a failed computer company and came up with a "solution:" the Open Software Foundation's Motif. What Motif does is make Unix slow. Real slow. A stated design goal of Motif was to give the X Window System the window management capabilities of HP's circa-1988 window manager and the visual elegance of Microsoft Windows. We kid you not. Recipe for disaster: start with the Microsoft Windows metaphor, which was designed and hand coded in assembler. Build something on top of three or four layers of X to look like Windows. Call it "Motif." Now put two 486 boxes side by side, one running Windows and one running Unix/Motif. Watch one crawl. Watch it wither. Watch it drop faster than the putsch in Russia. Motif can't compete with the Macintosh OS or with DOS/Windows as a delivery platform.

100 pages about the ins and outs of LM, a user forum, an offline edition and a news letter.

cu
tom, MUO-webslave

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Sorry, but this really pisses me off. I've had to mug around with my CSS to circumvent the buggy IE implementation (/span/ tags...), although I'm running a site aimed at Linux users. Because I care about users who use other OSes (even if it's Windos ;-)).
Why someone like this gets an honorable mention on /. is beyond my whatever (like so many things, sigh... ;-)).

Regards and thanks for your tips

tom

Regards

tom, MandrakeUser.Org

Mandrake is no longer just Redhat with pentium optimisations. If you bother to go look at their website
or at the spinoff site mandrakeuser.org (a good start page for many a newbie), you detect all the signs of
something that is more than Redhat.

Cooker is the CVS version that gets devel work. They have several ambitious projects like Lothar,
DrakConf, DiskDrake, and more, all independant of anything really from RH, and in my opinion,
nicer too. The system really has a different feel top to bottom, one that I appreciate more for a desktop system.
I'm not aware of any security level presets in RH, and there are no "preferred ftp access" type areas as per RH
(a way to charge for updates, hello?).

A system can be made into anything you want, distro comparison can only be based upon presets and defaults,
and the harder to quantify "feel" of the set. This is my favorite dist of linux for home and personal use.
It also has a very good response rate on the newbie and expert mailing lists, high Signal-to-Noise ratio.