Linux Format forums

[Marrea]

Thought I'd replace Mandriva 2007 Spring on my Toshiba laptop with 2008 from LXF102 DVD. I'm not really a great fan of Mandriva but I must say 2008 looks quite good.

Oddly, even though during installation I opted to put Grub on the root partition, it didn't do so but put it on the MBR. It's a dual boot with Windows XP laptop and when I rebooted, instead of going into Windows it booted into Mandriva. I had a look at the Boot Set-up section in Control Center and it was still set to /dev/hda3 in the drop-down box (this is what I had selected via the Configure button on the summary screen during installation). Very strange.

Mind you, I am always suspicious of distros which go ahead and decide the bootloader location without asking, and the first opportunity you have of doing anything about it is at the summary screen. It's almost as if changing it there doesn't actually have any effect at all and it just remains stuck on /dev/hda.

[Hudzilla]

<< I am always suspicious of distros which go ahead and decide the bootloader location without asking >>

Didn't Ubuntu cause you a similar problem a few versions ago?

As for Mandriva, we've been very impressed - something has changed, and the company really seems to be clawing its way back to the #1 position. Mike's working on a special DVD for 103 that will allow readers to install lots of different distros side-by-side to give them all a thorough test, and I reckon Mandriva will really impress people who haven't looked beyond Ubuntu for a while.

[Rhakios]

So, is it going to be VirtualBox and a bunch of compressed virtual disk images? It seems to me that you could fit far more distros on that way than by using isos.
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Bye, Rhakios

[Marrea]

[nelz]

[Hudzilla]

<< So, is it going to be VirtualBox and a bunch of compressed virtual disk images? It seems to me that you could fit far more distros on that way than by using isos. >>

VirtualBox, yes; not virtual disk images, though - we'd much prefer to give people the chance to install the Linuxes for real once they find the ones they like. In fact, I wonder if we ought to take a poll for people who have tried them all...

[Rhakios]

Live CDs then? I suppose that all the major distros, and quite any number of minor ones, come that way, some with installers and at least most of them keep to single CD size. A double sided DVD... I expect you'd get at least 8.

I wonder if they will open people's eyes, or merely confirm them in their opinions?

Edit: And by 8, of course I mean 16 on a double-sided DVD. Fortunately I went to bad shortly after posting that.
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Bye, Rhakios

[ollie]

[Rhakios]

Yes, 11:36pm, it was time for bed again

<clicks Preview instead of Submit, just in case he is still half-asleep>
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Bye, Rhakios

[Marrea]

Hmm, the love affair didn't last long I'm afraid. Can't get rid of Mandriva's usual constant annoying interference type noise, which I have always silenced before on my desktops by going into KMix and muting Aux. However, this doesn't work on my Toshiba. I have also tried muting everything else in turn without success.

So I thought I'd install 2008 on my multi-boot Asus Terminator desktop and enjoy it there.

[Rhakios]

The thing that has been annoying me most about Mandriva 2008, on my VMWare install, is the habit it has of undoing any of my changes to the look of it, such as replacing the 1980s looking digital clock with the plain text clock. Next reboot and it's back to the 1980s, grrr!
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Bye, Rhakios

[Marrea]

Yes, well it obviously seems to be undoing my instruction to put Grub on the root partition!!

At the moment, I am trying to install the proprietary driver (NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.07-pkg1.run) without much success so far. I thought if I had the proper graphics driver it might prevent the screen locking up.

My kernel is 2.6.22.9-desktop-1mdv and I have installed kernel-source-2.6.22.9-1mdv and kernel-desktop586-devel-2.6.22.9-1.mdv but when I run
sh NVIDIA-Linux-x86-169.07-pkg1.run
I get a message about No precompiled kernel interface was found. It attempts to download one but fails, and also fails to compile a new one.

/var/log/nvidia-installer.log says
kernel module load error : insmod : error inserting './usr/src/nv/nvidia.ko' : -1 Invalid module format
and
bootsplash: version magic '2.6.22.9-1mdvcustom SMP mod_unload 686 ' should be '2.6.22-9-desktop-1mdv SMP mod_unload 686 '

Not quite sure how to interpet this but I shall persevere.

[Rhakios]

I had a similar problem compiling VMWare tools on Mandriva, what I did was to edit the Makefile in /ur/src/linux to say:
EXTRAVERSION = .12-desktop-1mdv

Then I ran:

make oldconfig
make modules_prepare
make prepare

After which I could run vmware-config-tools.pl successfully for most of the modules it needed to compile.
Then again, I do not have the kernel-desktop-devel package installed, I'll have to have a look at it.

Edit: forgot to mention that I ran Mandriva to check on what I had done, and yes, it's back to the 1980s again.

More editing, you would of course want to change your EXTRAVERSION to suit your running kernel, but as I have updated, that's what I used for my running kernel.
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Bye, Rhakios

[Rhakios]

And there's more:
I have just installed the kernel-desktop-devel package and find that it /usr/src/linux still points to the main kernel source, not the devel files in kernel-desktop-devel, which might be the cause of your problem. You can specify an alternative kernel source tree with the nvidia installer by using the --kernel-source-path=/path/to/kernel-desktop-devel/ option
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Bye, Rhakios

[Rhakios]

And that's it, I officially give up on Mandriva 2008, I've just spent the last half hour trying every way I can think of to get the clock to stay the way I want it and it just won't have it. It appears to create an new clock_panelapplet<insert_gobbledegook>_rc file every time the desktop loads and ignores my carefully modified and saved versions. I expect this has something to do with the mandriva-desktop extensions which I have come to loathe in the past. Before anyone mentions it, disabling session management is one of the many things that make no difference.
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Bye, Rhakios