Software resources Nvidia / proprietary 3D driver System monitoring Dvd playback Wifi setup Names in LAN IR Remote How I like KDE to behave Setup of Compiz-Fusion Java in webbrowsers Flash in webbrowsers Hibernate and suspend to RAM Laptop related stuff Bluetooth phone communications Conclusion Feedback

Configuration of Mandriva Linux 2008.0

This page describes how I configure Mandriva on my systems.

Plenty of things I put here are focused on how I set up my hardware; so that next time (if any), I will not have to figure out what I did to get things going the last time. And if you wonder why I'm thinking of installing again: simple, if Mandriva and Linux are to get better, what else to do then to test the betas and release candidates and report bugs?
Well, next to that I want to be able to keep track of changes, improvements (or deteriorations) in the distribution but also in the software itself.
By the way, some of these instructions are very much related to the hardware that I'm installing this on, so I have added the spec of my systems (both hardware configuration and software config files).
This time I installed the Powerpack edition of Mandriva 2008.0 for x86-64 on my new laptop (madeira). I also did an installation of the 32 bit version on my desktop system (zurich).

I have used (well, installed and had a look at) the clubmember Powerpack dvd which contains more than the Free edition does, such as NVidia and ATI graphics drivers, Sun Java, Flash, Opera, Acrobat Reader, and as major highlights: Lindvd (dvd playback out of the box and legal all around the world) and the Fluendo codecs for playback of various media files, and then some. Not much more actually. All of these, except for Lindvd, can be obtained in other ways, but the Powerpack dvd is naturally much more comfortable.

Note:
commands to type have this colour and font
keystrokes/presses have this colour and font
cli = command line interface
lmb = left mouse button, mmb = middle mouse button, rmb = right mouse button
Most of the commands in this and subsequent sections are executed as root, use the command su (and give your root-password when prompted) to become 'root' and then execute those commands.

Resources configuration steps

To get a hold of the true power of urpmi, the Swiss knife of rpm software installation, you must first set up your sources/repositories. I'm assuming a functional internet connection at this point.
So head on over to the easy urpmi page and follow the 3-step instructions (choose your architecture, choose mirrors for your desired repositories, copy paste the given commands to your root cli, or past the information to the graphical wizard at Mandriva Control Center => Software Management => "select from where software packages are downloaded when updating the system"). Most important are plf and necessary for that the contrib media repositories, as playback of encrypted dvds and various other things will not be possible without plf-free and plf-nonfree. Quite a few things are not on the dvd, so it pays off to add main too. I had a quick look and if you count the amount of data in main and contrib you get over 15 GB, quite a bit more than fits onto one single layer dvd... (note: for Mandriva 2006 this used to be close to 10GB, so there's vastly more software available now, assuming that code didn't just start taking 50% more space..)

For more information on setting up urpmi, read the Resources Configuration and Software Install HowTo by Zeb.

Note: there's a real improvement in Mandriva 2008.0 (more precisely, since Mandriva 2007.1 Spring), namely when you go to the graphical software management section (Mandriva Control Center => Software Management, software installation / first icon), the system offers to set things up for all official repositories: main, contrib, non-free. So you only need the easy urpmi page for plf-free and plf-nonfree. Well, not exactly, you also need to go there if you want more information per package — the automagical configurator only gets the synthesis.hdlist, the rpm database that allows the system to know which software (rpm) packages are available and which other software they depend on. If you get the hdlist instead of the synthesis.hdlist, you can also browse (and search in) the description of each rpm package, which I find very helpful.

After configuring the repositories, it is really easy to install software, with RPMDrake (Mandrake Control Centre — Software Management) or urpmi:
urpmi [packagename(s)]
installs the package / program; it automatically gets all dependencies. Note also that you can put more than one program name / package name in one command.
Next to urpmi you can use urpmf [program name] to find out which package contains what program (for instance, urpmi kgoldrunner won't do you any good, you'll want kdegames...) and urpme [packagename] to remove packagename from your system.

Another remark: I have a 64 bit (x86-64) system — also known as AMD64, x64 and EM64T — so I have set up the x86-64 repositories. BUT: I have also added the 32 bit repositories (with a different suffix, as the easyurpmi page allows you to specify), and I use the Media Manager (MCC — Sofware Management — 4th icon 'Select from where software packages are downloaded...') to switch between installing 64 or 32 bit binaries. Note that the software management system will still resolve dependencies, which means that you can have only one executable for a specific program (they always go to the same location), but you may have both the 32 bit and the 64 bit version of a specific library on your system (32 bit libs go to /usr/lib/ and 64 bit libs to /usr/lib64/).

Nvidia / ATI proprietary 3d drivers

My laptop was carefully selected (by me) to be as much Linux friendly as possible (it came with Linux preinstalled to be more precise), so I chose one with Intel Integrated Graphics, GMA945, for which the graphics driver on any decent distribution are always included since they are fully open source; the next best (in terms of Linux friendlyness) graphics are Nvidia, which will be the best choice if you want high performance and/or an AMD system. At this very moment, I can still not recommend ATI graphics, though they can work (proprietary driver, just as with Nvidia, but still 'higher risk' — stay away from them if you have the choice, make do if you don't have any choice...), but 'soon' ATI graphics will be the way to go, since they are actively helping the Free Software community create Open drivers for their hardware.
My desktop has an Nvidia graphics card, and the system chose the proper driver automatically. For those of you using the Free download edition, you can rely on the software repository 'non-free'.
Note: this is completely different from before, since Mandriva now offer the closed source drivers in the publicly available non-free repository. Yay Mandriva! Naturally, for the following to work, you need to have added the non-free repository.
All you have to do is run XFdrake — you can start it as root from the command line, or start it from the Mandriva Control Center, Hardware, Set up the graphical server. Then choose your graphics card, and choose to use the proprietary driver. You should then restart the graphical system; the clean way is to log out and at the login prompt hit alt-e or ctrl-alt-del; the quickest way is to hit ctrl-alt-del before logging out, which kills the graphical server (any files open unsaved? too bad..) which will then get restarted, putting you back at the login screen. The Windows Way (tm) naturally also works: reboot.

System monitoring

To be able to keep an eye on the state of my system, I use gkrellm; to have cpu and motherboard temperature and voltage readouts, lm-sensors is needed. To install those, do:
urpmi lm_sensors gkrellm
Next to setup the sensor system:
sensors-detect
and just followed instructions (just accepted all default proposals). This creates the file /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors which indicates which modules must be loaded for lm_sensors to function properly. sensors gives the output from the sensors on the motherboard if the necessary modules are loaded (the modules that need to be loaded should by now be in /etc/sysconfig/lm_sensors, you can load them by hand and things should be ok). Of course the program gkrellm is much nicer for continuous display of your system stats. For my laptop which has a Core 2 Duo processor, the required module 'coretemp' is now available; I expected it to be here (2007.1 had an older kernel which didn't have it yet).

I also added hddtemp (naturally by doing: urpmi hddtemp) to my system, and had to update the /etc/hddtemp.db file to make sure the system knew my harddrive.

To have frequency setting information in gkrellm, I resorted to the plugin cpufreq by Christoph Winkelmann, which I downloaded from http://chw.tks6.net/gkrellm2-cpufreq/ and which I added to the .gkrellm/plugins directory after compiling it. To compile I needed to install lots of "dev" dependencies, but after that it was easy. Note that I only enable the displaying of the frequencies, I have bad experience with the speed slider and governor buttons, and besides the cpu frequency stepping works like a charm out of the box on my laptop.

Note that for some laptops (notably some Lenovo/IBM models) the use of lm_sensors is not required at all, and can even cause problems.

DVD playback with mplayer and xine (and frontends to those)

Now the stuff that is necessary to watch dvds (that Mandriva, or any other linux vendor / business for that matter, is not able to include, since it would violate some silly US law — although recently an enlightened judge has hinted that breaking that law for personal use of legitimately obtained non-illegal ware, i.e. to watch a dvd you bought on your Linux system, does not count as a violation...) has to be installed:
urpmi libdvdcss
will get you the necessary decryption to get xine or mplayer (or any frontend for those, such as kaffeine and totem) to playback dvds without any problems. Btw, if you start mplayer from the cli but you want the gui version and/or rightclick menus, just type gmplayer instead of plain mplayer... Of course you need to have the gui version installed, urpmi mplayer-gui to get it. Another thing: get mencoder from plf to make sure you get lame audio encoding available... those silly US laws again...

I have done some more digging, and on the Videolan site where libdvdcss is housed I found the info I have been looking for for quite a long time: on Linux with libdvdcss, the region code of your drive is not relevant, nor is the region code of the discs you play. The RPC2 counter just doesn't count, on drives that have no region set yet, this will stay that way — this I verified myself. You can check the drive's region on Linux with dvd_region.c which you can get from here.

Oh, in case you have issues, for playback of various video formats, you may want to do, as root:
urpmi win32-codecs
Note that you will have to have a 32 bit video player to work with those 32 bit codecs — on my 64 bit laptop, I could just also turn on all 32 bit (i586) repositories and then install xine or mplayer from there. This will get all libs and dependencies for that 32 bit player. I have not needed to do that, but I have tangled with 32 bit (i586) software so I know that it works that way. (I actually did it that way with Mandriva 2007.0.). Since Mandriva 2007.1 (or even 2007.0) I haven't actually installed the win32-codecs, xine and mplayer can play wmv files without those now.

There are some issues with video playback in combination with certain graphics cards / drivers and compiz-fusion. See also the release notes. In my case, I had trouble with xine, where I had to choose the xshm video output plugin, however for mplayer I could fix things by enabling the video plugin in compiz-fusion - which gave some nice features when using the 'zoom' plugin.

Wifi setup

To be able to use my wireless Intel A/B/G interface ipw3945 I just had to configure it, but if you're using the Free dvd download, you'll have to install the firmware and the proprietary daemon. Both are available from the non-free repository, and you will have to use a wired network interface (configured with the Mandriva Control Center) to get them.
urpmi ipw3945d ipw3945-ucode
After that you can configure the wifi with the graphical wizard, just as the wired nic. I like the net applet that shows up with the signal strength..

There are some problems related to my wifi, it doesn't wake up properly from suspend to RAM/disk (see Hibernate and suspend to RAM below for the fix.

One other thing I'd like to mention here: the wireless interface is the only piece of hardware that needs proprietary drivers, and there's a solution by the name of iwl3945 from Intel that will make the proprietary daemon redundant — the closed bits will all be in the firmware. Yay Intel!
I know to some that is still not enough, but it is to me as a (self professed) Free Software guy,... I consider Firmware to be part of the hardware, namely firmware gives hardware its functionality. The drivers (and other software) should be open source since the drivers plug into the kernel, and the drivers make use of the hardware functionality.
I tried out the iwl3945 driver, but it's too immature for now. It does work, but it doesn't survive any suspend to ram or disk. I'm sure it will be improved and I'm really happy that there will soon be a Free Software solution for my wifi needs.

Home LAN computer names

I used to do the following to set the hostnames so that with CUPS I could print over the network (if not set, there will be a problem between the ethernet address and the name that is given during installation; other hosts will not know the host with the printer by name, just address, but the name plus printer will show up in the cups www control panel), modify /etc/hosts to include the ethernet address and the name by which the host is known to itself.
echo "192.168.0.1 paris" >> /etc/hosts
echo "192.168.0.2 neuchatel" >> /etc/hosts
echo "192.168.0.3 zurich" >> /etc/hosts
echo "192.168.0.4 samos" >> /etc/hosts

This way, the client can find the host that has the printer connected to it since it can do address translation from the host name to the right ethernet address. Naturally, CUPS is just one example; this makes it possible for my machine to know all other machines by name, from web browsers to ssh and ftp on the command line.

Instead of the above method, I tried for once to use the GUI from the Mandriva Control Center. It worked fine. More work than copy-pasting the above stuff to a console though...

I also added quite a few nfs shares to /etc/fstab, and on the machines serving those shares I modified /etc/exports accordingly.

Setting up the IR Remote Control

The following was done on my desktop system 'zurich':
To get the remote control that came with my tv-card working, I needed LIRC, so I issued the following commands, as root:
urpmi lirc lirc-remotes dkms-lirc
cp /usr/share/lirc-remotes/hauppauge/lircd.conf.hauppauge /etc/lircd.conf
cp /usr/share/lirc-remotes/hauppauge/lircmd.conf.hauppauge /etc/lircmd.conf
vi /etc/sysconfig/lircd
(feel free to use any other text editor instead of vi) where I changed the following things:
DRIVER=UNCONFIGURED into: DRIVER=default
and:
HWMOD=UNCONFIGURED I replace with the following 2 things:
HWMOD=lirc_dev
HWMOD=lirc_i2c
Note that the lirc device is now correctly mentioned as /dev/lirc/0 so contrary to Mdv05 no need to change anything.

Finally, to start things I issued these 2 commands:
service lircd start
service lircmd start

For the lircmd there are some extra things necessary in the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file, namely the extra mouse section and the related mouse setting in the server section at the end of the file.
These are the relevant lines:
#added aRTee:
Section "InputDevice"
Identifier "LircMouse"
Driver "mouse"
Option "Device" "/dev/lircm"
Option "Protocol" "IMPS/2"
Option "Buttons" "5"
Option "ZAxisMapping" "4 5"
EndSection
and at the end:
Section "ServerLayout"
Identifier "layout1"
InputDevice "Keyboard1" "CoreKeyboard"
InputDevice "Mouse1" "CorePointer"
# added aRTee
InputDevice "LircMouse" "SendCoreEvents"
Screen "screen1"
EndSection


I just continued to use the file (that at the time I created with a lot of trial and error) in my homedir ~/.lircrc that makes lirc and mplayer work together. Make sure you do switch on lirc support of mplayer and xine. And voila. So now I can move the mouse with the remote, fully control mplayer from the sofa, go through menus in xine, like with a normal dvd player. And I have done the setup for Tvtime too, wonderful app!

Note: if you update the kernel, you will have to make sure the dkms-lirc package gets updated as well. In my case, I had to install the kernel-source of the new kernel, deinstall dkms-lirc, then reinstall it.

KDE / graphical user interface configuration steps

Most of the following things are done by the user, in the users home directory (/home/[user]) or with gui tools. Note that I did most of this before, I just continued to use the same /home partition and home dir.

First things first, which for me means to get usable (windows) behaviour. Meaning: not the standard behaviour that the most used OSes have, but something that you (I really) can actually work with. I want/need/require (hey it's my machine, I can require things of it, right?) the following:

1. window focus follows mouse (meaning, the window that the mouse pointer is on/in is the one that is active, so when I type it will go into that window)
2. clicking in any window with the lmb, mmb or rmb does not bring the window to front (meaning, I can actually select something in a window with the lmb without the window popping to the front)
3. move a window without having it on top
4. move a window without having to go to the window frame with the mouse pointer
5. resize a window without having it on top
6. resize a window without having to go to the window frame with the mouse pointer
7. bring a window to the front without having to go to the window frame with the mouse pointer
8. send a window to the back without having to go to the window frame with the mouse pointer
9. single click on icons to launch applications or descend into folders

It must be my lucky day, because all this can easily be done with Compiz-Fusion or Kwin on KDE. Actually, points 3 to 8 are readily available already, without having to change anything in the settings. Note that point 7 is necessary since I wanted that clicking in a window does not bring it to front (which is the case in the standard less usable behaviour). 3 and 4 is done with alt+lmb, 5 and 6 with alt+rmb, 7 and 8 with alt+mmb. To get this all, go to the KDE control center: Menu => what to do => administer your system => configure KDE. (Alternatively there are entries for all subsections of the KDE control centre in Menu => Configuration => KDE, but we'll be doing more than just this.) For Compiz-Fusion on KDE, use ccsm to configure things to your likings.
I have gotten a bit creative and made a shockwave flash page (warning: ~600KB) on what this behaviour looks like.

Setup of Compiz-Fusion

To be able to use Compiz-Fusion, you must have 3d capable graphics hardware and Compiz-Fusion has to be enabled, which you can do from the MCC. There are some extra plugins that don't get installed by default, if they interest you, use the software manager to get those packages too. After getting CF to run, I used ccsm, the compiz-fusion configuration tool, extensively, to get things working the way I want.
For video playback, there are some issues with xine, mplayer and the various frontends to those. See also the release notes and the errata of 2008.0. I made sure to turn on the CF plugin 'video playback' which gives some surprisingly cool effects combined with the zoom plugin.

Another thing to realise is that under KDE the hotkey alt+F2 doesn't work anymore, you have to set it up by opening ccsm, going to the general settings, commands, and put the following into the command 0 box:
dcop kdesktop KDesktopIface popupExecuteCommand
and while you're there, just put the following into the screenshot command box:
ksnapshot
Then, in the actions tab, make sure command0 is linked to alt+f2 and 'take a screenshot' to 'print'.

I set things up as I do with KDE; as for my favourite CF plugins, I use the cube, expo, opacity (but not opacify), widget layer (I put kicker and the external taskbar in it), and then some.

On my desktop I don't use CF, but on my laptop I do and I found that quite a few plugins don't work, and when I write "don't work" I mean "horribly hang the system". Be aware. Note that staying away from the problematic plugins now has my system running with CF without fail, and very stable.

Setting up java in Konqueror and Mozilla Firefox

Sun has decided to open up Java, but until it's GPL and included by default, it is available to Mandriva 2008.1 users via the non-free repository. To install it for Konqueror, just do:
urpmi java
then set up konqueror to use java:
Konqueror: Settings > configure Konqueror > Java & Javascript: enable Java globally.
I restarted Konqueror and browsed to my servers vnc web page, and it worked fine.

For FF you need to do:
urpmi java x86-compat-j2re
Unfortunately for those like me on 64 bit Linux, Firefox actually needs a plugin that Sun doesn't offer for 64 bit — seems they don't support 64 bit as much as 32 bit systems, so you have to install a 32 bit FF — which I didn't care for, I use Konqueror most of the time. You can read more about the hassles in this Mandriva Club forum discussion.
To install the 32 bit version of FF, you need to have set up the i586 repositories, then just install it. I have i586 and x86-64 repositories added to the system, and I use the Media Manager (MCC — Software) to switch between the 64 bit and 32 bit repositories.

Talking about browsers, in case you like to use Opera, you can get it from the i586 (32bit) plf non-free repo, so you can easily urpmi it; alternatively, you can just get it from opera.com, just download for the latest Mandriva version they mention and open the rpm package with the software installer.

Oh, before I forget, to get rid of the Firefox Blogrovr plugin there are two options: you can disable the plugin for your user only if you go to:
Firefox -> Tools -> Addons -> Extensions
To completely deinstall it, you can use the software installer GUI or the following command (as root):
urpme mozilla-firefox-ext-blogrovr

Setting up flash in Konqueror and Mozilla

Flash worked on Mandriva 2008.0 Powerpack out of the box, but here are the instructions for those who are using the Free edition.

Just as with Java, there are fully Free (in the free beer _and_ the FREE speech sense) flash players. You just have to do:
urpmi gstreamer-swfdec
and give it a try, and if it doesn't suit your needs, uninstall it with urpme gstreamer-swfdec and try:
urpmi gplflash
I tried several Free flash players (including gnash) but none would play back youtube videos (yet — I know gnash is close). Luckily, you can get the non-free (as in speech) player from Macromedia (nay, Adobe).

So I untar'ed the file from Adobe (no way I'm installing stuff from those guys, running their scripts as root or whatnot... ;-). After installing the flash player, of course you have to make your webbrowser aware that it exists.

Contrary to what Adobe claims about their flashplayer, you do not need a 32 bit browser — at least, on Linux you don't. All you need to do is install the 32-to-64-bit-plugin-converter:
urpmi nspluginwrapper
and do this:
nspluginwrapper -i [path to ]/libflashplayer.so
and you can enjoy youtube in your 64 bit browser (Firefox or Konqueror, whichever rocks your boat).

Note that I did try this for the 64 bit firefox and the java plugin, it didn't work... :-(

I've started to use the Firefox flashblock plugin, which you need to install just like any other Firefox plugin. For Konqueror, things are a bit easier: just go here: settings - configure Konqueror - plugins and tick the option: 'Load plugins on demand only'.

Laptop hibernate and suspend

I didn't have to do anything to get hibernate (suspend to disk) and sleep (suspend to RAM) working properly (that is, getting the system to wake up again) except for the wifi that would fail. To fix my network connection, I did the following:
I modified /usr/share/pm-utils/sleep.d/10network, namely I added:
ipw3945d-stop
rmmod ipw3945
in the suspend_network section, and
modprobe ipw3945
in the resume_network section. I admit, this is far beyond what any beginner could manage, so Linux may not be ready for the masses due to this. So be it. ;-)

Laptop related stuff

This section is about some laptop related stuff, for instance, I tend to work with the power adapted plugged in and no battery (to save the battery, it will wear out just from warming up all the time), but sometimes I want to move to a different seating position. So then I have to plugin the battery, disconnect the ac adaptor. But of course, before disconnecting, I want to know that the battery holds enough juice for the operation, but gkrellm and kpowersave don't indicate that properly (or just do cat /proc/acpi/battery/BAT1/state). So to fix proper displaying:
rmmod battery; modprobe battery
to get battery status and info in gkrellm, for kpowersave you also need to do:
service haldaemon restart

Some words on partitioning for laptops: make sure the swap file is larger than system RAM (well, this is actually not absolutely necessary) and that the swap partition is at the start of the drive. With my 160GB drive I noticed a big difference between the system resuming from the swap partition at the start of the drive compared to one resuming from the end of the drive (I get above 42MB/s at the very beginning of the drive, and barely 20MB/s at the very end). This has to do with the way harddisks work, they're just faster at the beginning than at the end. If you don't believe me, create a 2GB swap file at the very beginning, and one at the very end, and time the command dd if=/dev/hda_ of=/dev/null for both partitions. See?

Setup of special keys: I noticed in the stream of info from tail -f /var/log/messages that my special keys were partially detected but gave an 'unknown key event' kernel message. The same goes for the plugging of my ac power cord. Aside these key events that the kernel didn't know what to do with, there were some special ('multimedia buttons') that were just not mapped to anything. I used xev (urpmi xev to install it and plain xev on the command line to run it) to find out the keycodes of the latter type, and /etc/rc.local and ~/.Xmodmap to have those buttons properly detected. I could then use the regular KDE way to bind applications to those keys.

To go into a bit more detail, my /var/log/messages told me that I should use setkeycodes to ehm, set the keycodes for certain specific key events. So I added the following to my /etc/rc.local :
setkeycodes e079 200
setkeycodes e076 201
setkeycodes e062 202
which would make sure at the next boot these keys would be detected. To avoid having to reboot, I just issued those commands as root as well. This enabled the system to bind the key event to a keycode. Then I used xev to find out all the keycodes of the various buttons and Fn+xx keycombinations. The next step is to bind the keycode to a specific key name, which I put in ~/.Xmodmap like so:
keycode 160 = XF86AudioMute
keycode 174 = XF86AudioLowerVolume
keycode 176 = XF86AudioRaiseVolume
keycode 236 = XF86Mail
keycode 178 = XF86WWW
keycode 168 = F18
keycode 169 = F19
keycode 170 = F20
keycode 171 = F21
After this, and sourcing that file by running:
xmodmap ~/.Xmodmap
(logging off and on will do as well), I could use the regular KDE method of attributing a program to a button press. Note that the XF86Audio keystrokes (Fn+F7-9) already started working, except for the Mute keystroke.

When I first posted the above information for Mandriva 2007.1, long time Linux user Sławomir Skrzyniarz was kind enough to inform me about the method he used to get the multimedia keys of his laptop working.
He has an HP Compaq nx7400. The above method was not working or necessary in his case, but he found a simpler solution: run drakkeyboard (as root) and pick a keyboard name with the word 'laptop' in it.
This should make the keyboard function, notably the increase and decrease volume keys. Then you can run kcmshell khotkeys (as regular user) to set up the actions for the various buttons; go to "Mentor Office Wireless Keyboard" and check that for "Increase Volume" -> Dcop setting -> Argument should be 1. Then make sure it's the same for "Decrease Volume".

One thing about my audio keystrokes which I almost forgot: in kmix (right click the kmix speaker icon in the tray), make sure your 'master channel' is selected as 'front' if your laptop works like mine.

Bluetooth mobile phone communication

To get my connection going with my bluetooth phone (Samsung D500), I had to install the required packages:
urpmi kdebluetooth bluez-pin
_and_ (quite unexpectedly — this caused me quite a headache, until a friend told me I told him I had had to do this with 2007.0....) I had to do this:
echo "passkey-agent --default /bin/bluepin &" >> /etc/rc.local
After this, things worked well.

Conclusion

Since this time around I used the Powerpack Edition, I didn't need to set up any proprietary things, like my wifi ipw3945 (well, soon to be with a fully free driver, no proprietary daemon anymore, thanks to Intel!), flash and java (well, soon to be free and thus included in the Free Edition, thanks to SUN!) so it was a very quick and easy path to get everything configured. But even with the Free edition, it shouldn't be a big problem to get full functional Linux bliss. If you know what you need, you can certainly have a nicely working Linux machine within about 2 hours — less than one for installation, the rest for configuration. Well, provided your hardware isn't of the problematic type.

Enjoy Linux!! ;-)

Rob a.k.a. aRTee

Feedback

If you have any comments you can discuss this information here: or you can contact me via email.

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Page first created: November 20th 2007. Page last updated: 2007-11-26 20:44

Pages tested with but not specifically made for: lynx, konqueror, galeon, Opera, Mozilla, Firefox using OpenOffice.org, Quanta + and the Gimp on Mandriva Linux by aRTee
All contents © copyright 2003 - 2007, unless mentioned otherwise, published under the GNU Free Documentation License (FDL) by aRTee. Artwork and CSS don't fall under the FDL, standard copyright applies. Tux image from Larry Ewing. You may use anything published under the FDL on this site freely, as long as you include this copyright notice and a reference to the main address of this site: www.mandrake.tips.4.free.fr.