Saw a mag with mandrake 10 on it in WHSmiths, so purchased it to upgrade….bad decision! At least in september I was able to get Mandrake on the laptop but this time its installed and working – but not in a gui interface (and the wifi card still doesn’t work). When I try to run startx I get “failed to initialize the NVIDIA kernel module”. The weird thing is that there is a nice 10 with a star logo in the right hand side of the screen, and it is using a graphical logo to boot up……
Update Turns out I needed to install the latest driver, so a wget http://download.nvidia.com/XFree86/Linux-x86/1.0-5336/NVIDIA-Linux-x86-1.0-5336-pkg1.run downloaded the file.
Then a sh NVIDIA…..run complained it couldn’t find a kernel and that I needed it compiled or something BUT I didn’t have the kernel sources loaded.
rpm on kernel-source said that I needed gcc and a few more dependencies loaded.
Once I had loaded them all, ncurses, gcc, nlibsomethingorother I was then able to startx and get a graphical screen! Talk about complicated!
Oh great – the day after I actually use Mandrake to do some stuff with my cd drive, the register reports on an update that prevents Mandrake possibly destroying LG drives. Fortunately my drive is not an LG one, but it was a bit of a scary read.
Needed to burn some software onto CD for a server that I’m rebuilding that will not let me install the network card for. I downloaded a 22mb file onto the laptop and then somehow had to get it onto the server. XP would let me go through the motions of burning the file onto cd but then kept telling me to put a blank disk in (it was a brand new (expensive) one I had purchased from Tesco). Booted into Mandrake and ran through the k3 burn wizard in Gnome. This detected the cd drive and all looked hunkydory until I tried to burn the cd when it decided that I didn’t actually have a cd device available. Logged into KDE and same result. However right clicking on the cdrom icon on the desktop gave me the option to burn to cd – lo and behold that worked. So I’ve now got the Raid software on the server….now to get the network card working. Anyone know how to get round a “parameter not correct” problem when installing an AMD PCnet card into an IBM X-Series 230 and upgrading the box from nt4 to w2k?
Finally worked out how to get the laptop to default boot back to Windows instead of Mandrake. I had already configured /etc/lilo.conf but the changes needed to be written away to the boot sector. By su’ing and then running drakboot I was able to check the boot menu and when I clicked ok it saved the changes, a quick reboot later and I’m in XP and not Mandrake…..Now to try and fix the wireless lan.
Mandrake Update had 82 packages that needed fixing totalling 352mb. Now Microsoft get slammed for having lots of patches and download quantities but I don’t think they’ve released that many patches in the time that Mandrake 9.1 has been installed and certainly not that big either. AND Microsoft service packs are often found on magazine cover disks saving the download. (I just hope I can find where these patches have been downloaded to so I can reinstall from them at a later date if I need to.)
Mandrake 9.1 went on the laptop yesterday after 3 attempts. The install would just hang half way through. The second install I told it to show me the details of what it was doing as it progressed and I found it was failing to read the cd when installing the zip package, so the third time I didn’t tell it to install zip and it worked …….