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davecs

AT LAST !!!

davecs · Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 4:06 pm Post subject: RE: PCLinuxOS 2007: It

I don't know if this is good or bad, but, excluding CD sales and bittorrent, since the announcement on Monday there have been 36,520 downloads via the official mirrors.
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Rhakios · Posted: Sat May 26, 2007 6:23 pm Post subject: RE: PCLinuxOS 2007: It

Sounds good to me. I've got it running on my laptop now, having replaced TR4. Must get around to getting every last thing set up, some time.
I still had to use the dkms-alsa package to get sound though.
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Marrea · Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:31 pm Post subject:

Hi davecs

I've just downloaded and installed this afternoon and it's looking really nice.

Could you advise me which NVidia driver to use? I have a GeForce FX5200 card and after looking at Synaptic I am not sure which would be best out of:

dkms-nvidia_100.14.xx (Beta Release for GeForceFX and newer NVIDIA GX)
dkms-nvidia_97xx (for most NVIDIA video cards)
dkms-nvidia-cuda (for most NVIDIA video cards)

It would appear that dkms-nvidia_100.14.xx would be most appropriate but I am worried about the "Beta" tag. Confused

LATER EDIT
It's OK. I've now installed the _97xx. And I see that the description is actually "for new cards", not "for most cards". Not seeing straight !!

Marrea · Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 3:38 pm Post subject: Re: RE: PCLinuxOS 2007: It

Marrea · Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 9:48 pm Post subject:

I must say I am pretty impressed so far, having been playing around with PCLinuxOS 2007 most of this afternoon and evening. I love the look of it, a great improvement over 0.93.

Everything I have tried so far has just worked so easily:

RealPlayer with the BBC site (well, after first getting rid of MPlayer plugin !)
DVDs and mp3s
Installation of nvidia proprietary driver
Epson R300 printer
3D desktop effects

Looking forward to exploring further.

davecs · Posted: Mon May 28, 2007 11:47 pm Post subject:

On my old rig, I had an FX5200 card. I had problems (occasional lockups, especially in Firefox) with both 97xx drivers. The 100.14 driver was better in play, but brought back an old nvidia problem I had years ago: you couldn't return to framebuffer when leaving the graphical environment. I settled on 96xx which was stable and supports all the Beryl tricks. But not all FX5200 cards are exactly equal, I think mine was particularly cheap and nasty. I know others with FX5200 reported none of the problems I had with the 97xx drivers. I will still be maintaining the old rig, it's now mum-in-law's. She loves it because her old SiS630-based rig was like a snail through treacle in Firefox.

The nvidia drivers drop support for certain cards at certain points, which is why some older ones are still maintained, but I seem to remember sometime during the 8000's the nvidia framebuffer return problem stopped, and the 5200 was well supported at that time, with older cards like that you don't have to go for the latest. My advice is run each of them for a while, and see if any are more stable or run better.

I have new hardware as you can see from my sig, and I have to say, beta or no beta, the nvidia 100.14 driver is just brilliant on the newer cards. Since upgrading my hardware I got 2 temporary lockups using the basic kernel, but since I upgraded to the a64 kernel nothing of the sort. I use the 2.6.20.11-dev kernel from testing.

Check out also the ck-kernels, which have Con Kolivas' unofficial patches, if you have any latency problems with multimedia.
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Asus Asus M2N32 WS Pro+Athlon AM2/4200+ — GeForce 7600GT — 2Gb Cosair VS RAM — 500Gb WD5000AAKS SATA Drive — PCLinuxOS

Marrea · Posted: Tue May 29, 2007 6:10 pm Post subject:

pootman · Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 1:24 pm Post subject:

I've just had a look and i have to say, it's the second most impressive (linux) thing i've seen this year.

I was stunned to see the installer recognise my Netgear WG111 as a wireless networking option - the first installer to do so.

If it had gone on to actually work with either their chosen driver (islsm) or their bundled ndiswrapper, it would have been the most impressive thing I'd seen this year. Which is currently Slax.
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davecs · Posted: Wed May 30, 2007 1:48 pm Post subject:

Thanks for your kind words, pootman.

If you fancy a little play with it, here are two threads where people got a WG111 v2 going using ndiswrapper. I don't know how close that is to your model:

http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=20667.0

http://www.pclinuxos.com/index.php?option=com_smf&Itemid=26&topic=21606.0
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Asus Asus M2N32 WS Pro+Athlon AM2/4200+ — GeForce 7600GT — 2Gb Cosair VS RAM — 500Gb WD5000AAKS SATA Drive — PCLinuxOS

pootman · Posted: Thu May 31, 2007 3:11 pm Post subject:

Thanks for that. The first link had it. I was so used the XP driver working, it never occured to me to try the w98 one, and it worked.
A couple of minutes to install realplayer from the default repository and I'm listening to Radio 3 again, another minute for win32-codecs and Classic FM still doesn't work (but that's normal, i'll fiddle with it later).

Also: Nice to see the installer remind me to run chkdsk after resizing an ntfs partition, haven't seen anyone else do that yet (bit of a shock to go straight into the resize after selecting the new partition size, but i suppose i was warned beforehand).
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Ram · Posted: Sun Jun 03, 2007 12:54 am Post subject:

Looking good so far Smile

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