danleff

Did you do the install from the command prompt after exiting from the x server? Also, try changing your Driver "vesa" option, as per the directions; "If you already have an X config file working with a different driver (such as the 'nv' or 'vesa' driver), then all you need to do is find the relevant Device section and replace the line: Driver "nv" (or Driver "vesa" ) with Driver "nvidia" In the Module section, make sure you have: Load "glx" You should also remove the following lines: Load "dri" Load "GLcore"

I probably already know the answer, but this router is connected via a cable modem, so that you have; Mandrake system--> Vigor 2200E --> cable modem? And the primary connection from the Vigor 2200E is to the cable modem? And it does work in Windows, usng this setup? When in Mandrake, when you type ifconfig as root, what is the output? You are using dhcp and configured this when installing Mandrake? Finally, what specific motherboard/system do you have?

Found a couple of articles on the vaio and video card. Looks like Fedora Core 1 works, with some modifications. The problem lies with the video card and the xf86config settings. For reference see here.

Depends on your system, hardware and current experience with Linux. Post some specs on your system and what you want to do as main tasks, Multimedia, gaming... What version of windows are you using? Yes, this can make a difference. If you have access to a cd burner, take a look at Distrowatch. If you don't have ready access to a cd burner, many distros can be purchased cheap at various sites, such as Linux Central. Or, you can try a cd based version of Linux, such as Mepis or Knoppix (runs soley from a cd) to get comfortable with Linux and see how your hardware reacts to Linux. You should have no difficulty with the newer distros setting up a dual boot system, but based on what hardware you have now may make a difference on what distro to choose. We can help guide you through this, depending in what distro that you choose.

Ther version that you got is a demo version. In order to use the Software Gallery, you do need to purchase the full product and get a registration ID code. So, the demo works, minus the benefit of the Software Gallery. Have you considered other flavors of Linux that do not have this requirement?

You can't use unfree space, as this is designed for systems that have some unformatted free space on the drive. In your case, you will need to use free available space on the win 98 partition, or resize your win 98 partition (as you whole disk is formatted for win 98). Since you have so little disk space to begin, either you need to use PartitionMagic (try to grab a copy from a friend) or allow Mandrake to take the rest from the win 98 partition. Take a look at the instructions here. Note the following; Use the free space on the Windows partition: if Microsoft Windows is installed on your hard drive and takes all the space available on it, you have to create free space for Linux data. To do so, you can delete your Microsoft Windows partition and data (see “ Erase entire disk” or “Expert mode” solutions) or resize your Microsoft Windows FAT partition. Resizing can be performed without the loss of any data, provided you previously defragment the Windows partition and that it uses the FAT format. Backing up your data is strongly recommended.. Using this option is recommended if you want to use both Mandrake Linux and Microsoft Windows on the same computer. I don't use anything else and have not found a free partitioning utility, except for those that come with linux. 8) Perhaps someone else has a solution they have used, but I will look around. OK, I found something. Take a look at MajorGeeks. It has a tool called 7Tools Partition Manager 2004 here. It is shareware, but it should work for your needs without paying. But, be aware, make sure that your data is backed up and that you defrag. the drive before you begin. Realize, if you choose this option to allocate your partitions, I have not used it, so I can't really recommend it. It installed fine on my system, but I actually did not do anything with it. I still suggest using Mandrake's tools. Read the documentation. Mandrake will auto allocate what it needs, which in your case is preferred, unless you know what you are doing setting up linux partitions. So, in summary, you can; 1. Try and let Mandrake take your existing free space to install, following the directions on the link provided (recommended). 2. Try to resize the win 98 partition with Mandrake, back out of the install once the partition is resized (without installing Mandrake itself), then restart the install and tell Mandrake to use the free unformatted space. 3. Use the partitioning utility to resize the Win 98 and leave about 1.5 -2 gigs for Linux, then allocate 100 mb for swap and the rest as ext2 (not recommended). The issue is that Mandrake's installer and partitioning tool will use you free space to allocate what it needs, including calculating what swap space that it needs. No fuss, no muss. [Edited by danleff on 2004-08-31 05:38:38] [Edited by danleff on 2004-08-31 05:39:17]

Godric, look under the post that you started.

I have to give credit where it is due. Look at this post. 10mhz gives a short how-to on how to do this. Rawrite comes in a dos flavor and should be on the Mandrake install disk, under dosutils. However, is this system a Latitude XPiCD? If so, how much ram is in the system? This may be an issue, as Mandrake 10 recommends the following hardware; Processor: an x586-class or above processor is required. This includes Intel Pentium I/II/III/IV, AMD K6/II/III, AMD Duron, AMD Athlon/XP/MP. SMP multi-processor machines are supported. (*) Memory: at least 64 MB is required (32 MB for text-install); 128 MB or more is recommended. Hard disks: IDE and SCSI hard disks are supported. Hard disk size: At least 500MB is required, 1GB is recommended.

Perhaps you can explain more on what you are trying to do. You don't install Mandrake from DOS. Mandrake is it's own operating system independent from dos or windows. Any reason why you don't want to install from a CD? This is the preferred way to install Mandrake. More importantly, what laptop do you have. Give some specs. on your system; memory installed, hard drive size and processor speed. Speaking of "dos" tends to make me believe that your system may not support Mandrake?

Try this. Get to a terminal window, change to root user and type in alsaconf. See if this allows you to configure your sound. If this works, then run alsamixer and make sure that the sound is not muted. In terms of the cd disks, where did you get the ones that you are using?

Originally posted by SoulNothing: Quote: thanks for the responses danleff there really is no issue right now i just havent had much success reconfiguring either grub or lilo despite reading manuals i looked around some more and i got some more isos i think im going to set core as the main and the others as ones to learn with since im still a basic user/noob i do not know how to reconfigure the boot loader. The point I was trying to make is that you need to be prepared for the possibility of needing to reconfigure your main bootloader if you plan on install multiple distros. It is easy to make the mistake of overwriting your main bootloader if you are not careful. Been there! So, having a boot disk or CD for each distro (or knowing how to use rescue mode) would assure that if you loose your main distro's bootloader, you can always recover it easily. One thing that I like about Grub, is that you can edit any mistakes that you made to the menu.list at the boot menu. So, if you make a small syntax error with a subsequent kernel or distro that you install, it can be corrected easily. You can then correct your mistake by writing to menu.list, once the system boots. Correcting "on the fly" - nice! Jim, I wondered what the issue was. Makes sense when I think about it now. Mepis 2004 final looks real nice and is great for easily browsing all my partitions, as it detected all of them. This makes it easy to trade data between eash partition (distro) without manually mounting each one. One issue I found (probably connected to my install) is that I used kernel 2.6 and K3b locks up solid, to the point that the whole system locks (mouse and keyboard)- no reboot or kill is possible. Anyone else been having this problem?

I just attempted an install of Mepis 2004 final. You may want to check this out, it is feature rich! The issue that I ran into, is that Mepis insisted on installing lilo or grub without an option to install on a floppy, a problem in my case. So I aborted the install. The system works, but it did not get far enough to allow me to set my users and passwords. This is the first consideration, whether the install will allow you to place lilo or grub where you want it. I like to test the distro first, then add it to my original Grub or Lilo when I am satisfied. Why was this a problem? I have six distros on my box, booting with Grub. I would rather add one distro at a time, than re-do all the settings totally for each distro every time I install one. If I remember (and I have not tried a new install yet) Yoper is an auto install also. So, you want to find out if the install allows you to put Grub or Lilo where you want it, such as on a floppy to test. Not just installing a bootloader at will. Then you can add it to your original bootloader later. Either way, always make a floppy disk when the install allows, to recover later if you need to. It makes life easier. A 120 gig drive is nice and allows multiple distro installs. You can create one swap partition and point each distro to it, so you don't need to have multiple swap partitions, such as one for each distro. I have Mandrake 10, Fedora Core 2, Mepis, Debian, Puppy Linux and Linspire all on my systems. Each has it's good and bad points. You have already tried a number of distros. Pick one for your main distro (the one that seems to meet your needs and that you are comfortable with) and then you can experiment with others at your hearts content!

One of three possible problems. I suspect that the system hardware may not support Mandrake. 1. You get a text type screen when you boot the cd with no welcome screen? What specific video card do you have? Any idea how many megs on the video card? 8megs... 2. Your hardware may only support a text install. At the "dos like screen" (really a install prompt screen) what happens if you just press the return key? Or, what happens if you type in text and hit the return key? Do you get a prompt at boot, or can you type anything in (is there a prompt at all)? 3. Where did you get the Mandrake cd's? Are they on a cdrw cd or cdr media? If you burned them yourself, what speed did you do the burn at? More than 4X or 8X? Older cdrom drives may not like the burned cd's, especially if they are burned on a newer cdrw drive, at too fast a speed, or on cdrw media. Older cdrom drives do not like burned cdrw disks.

Originally posted by the pom: Quote: I have used the terminal window to issue the <su root> command. This works ok, as does my password. No other command will work. So, if I type <ifonfig>, I get a message saying this command is not found. I get this for anything I type, for instance <adsl –start>. The exact result would be like this….. Actually, you may just be having syntax errors. Did you mean ipconfig as the command? Also, no space between adsl and start, so it should be adsl-start. Do other commands work, like lsmod as root?

Oops, I thought that I was clear, going ne step at a time. If you want to just recover the XP bootloader, you can use the fixmbr option, provided that you have a Windows XP install disk (XP was not pre-installed and you don't have the install cd). If you do this, essentually you have lost the ability to boot Suse on the slave drive, unless you have the full Suse install disk (cd), or know how to recover Suse otherwise. You can boot both right now, as long as you don't remove the Suse drive from the system that has grub installed on it. If you keep both drives in the system for now, you can boot into Suse and work from w/i Suse to effect a solution using the NT (Windows XP) bootloader. I just did this with my backup system. It's easier (I think) than working from within XP to change the attributes of boot.ini. I did it with lilo, but have not researched using grub yet. Once the XP bootloader (boot.ini) is set, then you can choose/swap your other drives (other than XP)when working in XP. Just don't choose the option for Linux on boot. Of course, the best option right now is to find a solution you feel comfortable with, which may be to boot Suse using Grub (since it is already there on Suse) via a floppy disk. By using the fixmbr, you allow a boot to XP (via the hard drive) only and can boot Suse at will from the floppy. If you think XP will be your main OS and feel that you need to swap hard drives (the suse hard drive and the backup drive), then you can start with the fixmbr solution, once you have the Suse grub boot floppy made. If suse will be your main OS, then you will probably want to have Suse on a hard drive that you will keep in the system all the time, using Grub as the botloader. Nebulus is right, you do not need to reinstall anything right now, rather decide how you want to boot the system/how you want your hard drives set up. The effect the solution. Personally, I would look toward a fixed solution, so swaping drives or the bios order of booting is not necessary.

Quote: Got into "Installing packages", when an error box popped up reading "ERROR INSTALLING PACKAGE: There was an error installing glibc-common-2.3.3-27. This can indicate media failure, lack of disk space, and/or hardware problems. This is a fatal error and your install will be aborted. Please verify your media and try your install again." I did run disk verify on CD 1 (the one reporting the error) and it vrified just fine. In case it might be a hardware issue I replaced the hard drive witih a brand new one (60 GB, so space shouldn't be an issue), get the same error. Replaced the CD drive with a fairly new DVD/CD drive, same error. It does happen! Either a bad cable/wrong type of cable, of the cable was not making a solid connection. Had this happen a few times myself playing around in my system box. Of course, the messages you got asked you to try the obvious...check the media. Then the next no-so-obvious...bad hardware. Well, really a hardware connection. Frustrating, but nice work!

Boy, either you did your homework, or are lucky in terms of your hardware. Mandrake 9.0 (not 9.1 or 9.2) specs are; Pentium processor or compatible CDROM drive At least 32 MB RAM (64MB recommended for graphical installation) Mandrake 9.1 and above require at least 64 mb of ram. So, you may have to install via a text install rather than a graphic install. Dapper Dan can suggest an x-windows desktop that may run better than KDE, such as IceWM. This will run much better in this system. Yes, you can use the Mandrake installer the partition your drive, as long as you have fat32 for the Windows 98 partition. This will allow Mandrake to allocate partitions for you. Yes, you can share files with the fat32 partition. The hard drive is small, but if you don't have much on the Windows partition (did not add a slew of programs or mpg's), you should be ok. Mandrake will need at least 1 gig of free space. Mandrake will use existing free space on the fat 32 partition to install for you, if you wish. One word of caution. Defrag your windows 98 drive (partition) before installing Mandrake. This will prevent any data loss on the win 98 partition that may occur during the process. This is tight, but probably will work. If you have PartitionMagic, look at the drive and see how much space is used. If less than 1.5 gig is free, try removing some uneeded programs, defrag and look again. You should be able to use it with your home lan, the card that you have is supported. However, this system will need to be connected through a router. More on this later. Lastly, just to be sure, make a bootable floppy of Win 98 in case something goes wrong, Not that it will, but to be safe.

It looks like you have a kernel installed for Athlon, but are trying to install the package for i686. This is the wrong NTFS package. It looks like there is not one for the athlon kernel that you have yet. Also, you have the custom kernel for 16 stacks. I would suggest that you contact the maintainers of the NTFS project and ask about compatability with your kernel, or if they plan a release (or jave a work around). There is also a help page that you may want to check out on the NTFS project page.

I bet the kernel does not have DHCP set to run on startup as a module or compiled into the kernel. Darn, I wish I could remember where the setting is exactly in the network modules during the compile.

Just a note on my config. Senario 2 works on my D-Link wireless router. As long as you avoid USB...use ethernet only to connect each computer to the router.

Yes! Use a cdr. And since you can't use it anyway to add new files, finalize that cd! Burn them at a slow speed 4X or 8X. Nero usually warns you that you need to finalize the disk, due to the iso file size. Remember, current distro iso files are at the write limit of many cdr disks. Finalizing them allows the data volume to be written completely to the disk.

ahh...yes.those HP, Gateway and Dell SB "legacy" cards. Still have not found mine to look at. Can you say frustration!

I can tell you from my experience that Mandrake 10 (if that is the version that you have) does not write to NTFS partitions. You are better off making a fat32 partition to share files between Linux and Windows. This way, you can access these files from Windows XP and Mandrake. I would avoid trying to write to NTFS, especially with critical files.

Don't worry about the newest and best... Look at the distros that may fit your needs. Read reviews, or visit distrowatch.com to look at what is out there. Suse Pro 9.1 costs now, but earlier versions can be gotten cheap. See here for example, if you don't want to download free versions - ie: don't have a fast internet connection. Note that Suse 9.1 Pro costs. Since you want to share files between XP and Linux, I suggest the following to avoid the XP/kernel 2.6 issue (Fedora Core 1 or 2, Mandrake 10). Get ahold of a partitoning utility, like PartitonMagic. Make a fat32 partition right after your XP NTFS partition to use to share your MP3's and such, at a size that fits your needs to share. This avoids the issue with XP next to the newest Linux distros using the new kernel. Allow the rest of the drive space left, or what you wish to allocate to Linux to be unformatted. Allow your new chosen distro to use the unformatted space to install onto. Get comfortable with your distro without adding a bunch of apps to your original install. Then decide if you need to make any changes on how things are set up (various partition setups with Linux) and come back and ask us. For now, don't get too hung up on formatting the drive (how many linux partitions - root/home/etc..). This can be confusing to a new Linux user. Keep it basic..then decide if you need any changes on how things are set up.

Be careful of Mandrake 10. If XP is the only OS and you install Mandrake 10 next to it, the XP partition (if it is NTFS) may get altered. If you do install Mandrake 10, I suggest not using the Mandrake partitionigng utility, but to partition the drive ahead of time (to make space for Mandrake) using a utility like PartitionMagic.