Slashdot Mirror

When I used to be the admin on the Mandrake User's Board, now http://mandrivausers.org/ , we adopted a number of policies governing user "politeness" and "helpfulness" with a focus on new users. It was a huge success and we had a large number of newbies! I mention all of this with a sense of nostalgia but also to show that not all Linux Forums are a bunch of jerks on a power/ego trip. Of course, it helped that I was out of work at the time and it was Spring :) Here's a shout out to the moderators and other admin's on the board! To Paul, Mystified, Spiny, Scoopy, Tyme and all other hard working Mods! Love Cannonfodder..

Their website, mailing lists, documentation and most of the forums on the Mandriva club site are all in English. There are some French forums on the Mandriva club site (along side the English ones) but that's about it. There're also plenty of 3rd-party English speaking sites, eg. http://mandrivausers.org/
I don't speak or read a word of French and I've never had a problem.

I think the GPs point was that letting designer's pick a specific font is better than them deciding to use an image instead of text

Which is why most images (at least at some point) on the web contain only text. This is obvious if you ever used or were victim to the infamous Webcollage screensaver (the "porn screensaver"), which displayed randomly selected images from the web. You get a screen full of random text and porn. Not a good impression to leave for your new college roommate when you leave for class right after your fresh RH9 install.

if you find broken Linux boxes so incredibly easy to fix, I have just one thing to say to you:

Help me. I've had no sound for about a month and nobody seems to know why.
http://mandrivausers.org/index.php?showtopic=43193 &st=0&gopid=327397&#entry327397

Mandriva (err Mandrake) will always have a soft spot in my heart as my first distro (I think it was 8.0 or 8.1 in the end of 2001). Anyway, it was a fine distro back then and I felt that URPMI never got the credit it deserved. Sure their repositories did not have nearly as many packages as Debian's, but with the official repos coupled with Texstar's, I was always happy. Although I haven't tried Mandriva in years (though I still use the partitioning tool on the install CDs fairly often), the features, screenshots, and community surrounding the distro make it look like it is still a very viable choice for a desktop beginner distro.

/me heads to the Mandriva User Board for nostalgic purposes...

I already had used that UbuntuGuide page instructions before you suggested them. And I tried following the instructions in another post in this thread, but "modprobe nvidia" kept getting "FATAL: Module nvidia not found". Even though the nvidia_drv.o file was sitting in /usr/X11R6/lib/modules/drivers . So, since "uname -r" said 2.6.10-5-686, I ran "apt-get install linux-restricted-modules-2.6.10-5-686", which installed successfully - as several other pages I Googled recommended to do. Now I can modprobe nvidia OK, and lsmod |grep nv says

nvidia 3923452 0
nvidia_agp 7612 0
agpgart 33608 3 nvidia,nvidia_agp,intel_agp

So I "/etc/init.d/gdm restart", get the nVidia splash screen, Ubuntu starts. But no noticeable speed increase: for example, if I run "mplayer http://knowitallvideo.com/videos/1112708210789.wmv ", mplayer does play it, but also dumps "Your system is too SLOW to play this!" Firefox takes 15-20 seconds to open, and new windows take several seconds.

After installing/configuring/running prelink, I noted no speedup. Particularly, mplayer still thinks my computer is too slow. And attempting to restart gdm after shutting down the X server failed, until I rebooted - after which mplayer still thinks my computer is too slow.

After installing/configuring/enabling Xcompmgr, FireFox starts in 7-9s, but mplayer still says my computer is too slow. However, the video plays at proper framerate. I'd like a benchmark app to run, to get real performance numbers out of the current config, and compare them to other people's perf. Then I'd know whether I'm just too demanding.

I do have another problem now, since I enabled xcompmgr (-fF). A FireFox window with an animated GIF, like (usually) the Slashdot homepage, with the mplayer video window over it, shows the animated GIF through the mplayer window (even though I have not run transset). And I don't actually see any drop shadows. Can I somehow have the compositing video acceleration, without any of the special effects like fade in/out, which I don't like anyway?

Also, a problem I've had since I got into this with Ubuntu is now even worse: When I choose "Log Out" from the System menu, it used to take 10-20 seconds to get the dialog of choices. Now it doesn't come up at all, and the entire desktop becomes "unclickable" (no response to clicking, though the mouse moves well). I can still three-finger-salute X into killspace, and shutdown -rf now from the CLI, but that's no way to run a desktop. Killing xcompmgr removes that problem.

I will say this: the window redraws are very fast now (slight vertical ripping when dragging some of them). And with xcompmgr off, the whole system does seem faster. Thanks for helping out.

I've never had that library issue you're talking about with compiling so I can't help you there.