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shafe1 · 05-24-2000, 10:15 AM

I'm with ya on the trouble of installing... I keep reading different opinions, on the same distributions... one person says it's a breeze another says it's a living nightmare. My problems start after the software install finishes I tried setting the X config to the actual monitor type and Video card I have and the test usually asks me to try again. I've been told that I should try the Xconfigurator from a console and not in the Grahical mode, and also not to test it and to also play with the resolutuions. Another problem is I have a sound card that Windows said was a ESS 1868, which Mandrake Supports (it's ISA PNP). When I try to detect it Mandrake reports "The following erro occured in mpo..." but doesn't tell me the error. I tried to manally configure the card in Lothar, it didn't like that... and if you read any of my other posts you'll see I've lost all the desktop Icons before,for no apparent reason. Recently after I had it installed, I decided to take a break before trying to reconfigure the default video that was working and I let my son peruse some of the games. He played asteroid and Smiletris (he loves Ktron though I don't know why). I watched him a lot and He really didn't do anything wrong. But later when He tried to log back in and play those games again, they wouldn't start. The menues would close like they were starting but nothing would happen. I logged into another page and started X and ran the games as root, and myself... but he couldn't. Then after I restarted the PC I started getting a message that Hda5 was uncleanly unmounted. Neddless to say (I haven't had time yet but I will this weekend) I'm going to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-install it but this time I'm starting with only the Video card in. Then once I have that working, I'll go to the sound card (which by the way wouldn't work even when I told it the settings for IRQ and DMAs that Win98 reported) I think I need to run the pnpdump and isapnp then recompile the kernel to get it to work (I have read a little, you see). Then I'll get to the nic (an intel 16 bit), then hopefully I can get the Printer on my old win95 486 setup as a network printer on Linux (IF I can figure out the addressing it requires.... Even if I can only use the Lexmark inkjet for printing Text... it would be nice). Anyways, I've decided to give Mandrake a couple more tries, then if I can't get it working I'm going onto Corel Deluxe (at least they give you a cool looking game to help get the jkids into the new OS... They also give you a littel 3 inch penguin mascot :-) ... I hope they put as much thought into their setup)I really don't want to drop back to Windows 98, I recently thought of doing a dual boot system (since I was having so much trouble with gettin Mandrake going solo) and after I finally got Winblows 98SE to rcognize the bigger hard drive (13.6 GB- required the overlay because my MB only supports up to 8.4 GB) I started getting errors again from Win98. Once again I wiped the drive and removed EZ-BIOS from the disk. Oh yeah one last problem... I installed StarOffice following the istructions which were basically non-existant (open a terminal and run rpr -blah, blah, blah!) It finished the workstation install and said it was adding it to the Kde panel and then somwhere else 9can't remember where) well after It was done I couldn't find an icon for it anywhere. I thought maybe I had to restart X (or maybe it told me I had to... it was a couple weeks ago) and I still couldn't find it. I even looked in my user directory to see if there was anything in there (since I had done a workstation install there should've been something) Nothing! One more plus for Corel it comes with WordPerfect 8 for Linux Suite. But, I'm a fair guy (and sometimes cheap :-) ) I'll give MAndrake more time to prove itself.

05-24-2000, 10:15 AM	#19
shafe1 Member (6 bit) Join Date: Apr 2000 Location: Florida Posts: 58	I'm with ya on the trouble of installing... I keep reading different opinions, on the same distributions... one person says it's a breeze another says it's a living nightmare. My problems start after the software install finishes I tried setting the X config to the actual monitor type and Video card I have and the test usually asks me to try again. I've been told that I should try the Xconfigurator from a console and not in the Grahical mode, and also not to test it and to also play with the resolutuions. Another problem is I have a sound card that Windows said was a ESS 1868, which Mandrake Supports (it's ISA PNP). When I try to detect it Mandrake reports "The following erro occured in mpo..." but doesn't tell me the error. I tried to manally configure the card in Lothar, it didn't like that... and if you read any of my other posts you'll see I've lost all the desktop Icons before,for no apparent reason. Recently after I had it installed, I decided to take a break before trying to reconfigure the default video that was working and I let my son peruse some of the games. He played asteroid and Smiletris (he loves Ktron though I don't know why). I watched him a lot and He really didn't do anything wrong. But later when He tried to log back in and play those games again, they wouldn't start. The menues would close like they were starting but nothing would happen. I logged into another page and started X and ran the games as root, and myself... but he couldn't. Then after I restarted the PC I started getting a message that Hda5 was uncleanly unmounted. Neddless to say (I haven't had time yet but I will this weekend) I'm going to re-re-re-re-re-re-re-install it but this time I'm starting with only the Video card in. Then once I have that working, I'll go to the sound card (which by the way wouldn't work even when I told it the settings for IRQ and DMAs that Win98 reported) I think I need to run the pnpdump and isapnp then recompile the kernel to get it to work (I have read a little, you see). Then I'll get to the nic (an intel 16 bit), then hopefully I can get the Printer on my old win95 486 setup as a network printer on Linux (IF I can figure out the addressing it requires.... Even if I can only use the Lexmark inkjet for printing Text... it would be nice). Anyways, I've decided to give Mandrake a couple more tries, then if I can't get it working I'm going onto Corel Deluxe (at least they give you a cool looking game to help get the jkids into the new OS... They also give you a littel 3 inch penguin mascot :-) ... I hope they put as much thought into their setup)I really don't want to drop back to Windows 98, I recently thought of doing a dual boot system (since I was having so much trouble with gettin Mandrake going solo) and after I finally got Winblows 98SE to rcognize the bigger hard drive (13.6 GB- required the overlay because my MB only supports up to 8.4 GB) I started getting errors again from Win98. Once again I wiped the drive and removed EZ-BIOS from the disk. Oh yeah one last problem... I installed StarOffice following the istructions which were basically non-existant (open a terminal and run rpr -blah, blah, blah!) It finished the workstation install and said it was adding it to the Kde panel and then somwhere else 9can't remember where) well after It was done I couldn't find an icon for it anywhere. I thought maybe I had to restart X (or maybe it told me I had to... it was a couple weeks ago) and I still couldn't find it. I even looked in my user directory to see if there was anything in there (since I had done a workstation install there should've been something) Nothing! One more plus for Corel it comes with WordPerfect 8 for Linux Suite. But, I'm a fair guy (and sometimes cheap :-) ) I'll give MAndrake more time to prove itself.