OK, I''ve been using xandros for a a couple of weeks now, it seems pretty good, as long as I don''t try to install anything. Which is where the problems start. I''ve been thinking of buying or obtaining manrake but I won''t to know if it supports a few of the things that xandros does first. First of all, the linmodem support. Xandros is the first version of linux I could really experience because it had out of the box winmodem support, does mandrake have this? It''s really hard too download and install modem drivers without web access. Secondly, does Mandrake allow you to use your Windows partition? Another kudos to xandros was that I could read (but apparently not write) to my windows partition, so I got to test out multimedia capabilities and such. And finally, does mandrake have some sort of auto mounter for CD ROMs and USB devices? I think this is part of KDE but I can''t be sure. And whats it like trying to install programs in mandrake? Xandros comes with xandros networks thats meant to handle installing .deb and.rpm files but it doesn''t appear to install them, or at least if it does I have absolutely no Idea where they go, I''ve tried searching and looking in the expected directories. One of the other problems was when I grudgingly attempted compiling programs from the command line, xandros doesn''t appear to have the files set up where makefiles expect to find them. So, any advice for a linux n00b?

quote: Original post by flukus
Secondly, does Mandrake allow you to use your Windows partition? Another kudos to xandros was that I could read (but apparently not write) to my windows partition, so I got to test out multimedia capabilities and such.

Does any distribution not let you read from your Windows partitions (and, depending upon the file system, write to it)? If you''re just talking about easy-to-find file manager integration type stuff, I don''t see why Mandrake wouldn''t have it.

quote: Original post by flukus
And finally, does mandrake have some sort of auto mounter for CD ROMs and USB devices? I think this is part of KDE but I can''t be sure.

According to Mandrake''s features page, they now use magicdev for that (random details: I think they used to use supermount and that magicdev is what Red Hat created for the same purpose, but I could be mistaken). I tried magicdev out for a while in Debian and it seemed fine.

quote: Original post by flukus
And whats it like trying to install programs in mandrake? Xandros comes with xandros networks thats meant to handle installing .deb and.rpm files but it doesn''t appear to install them, or at least if it does I have absolutely no Idea where they go, I''ve tried searching and looking in the expected directories.

Do the programs not place themselves in the menus of KDE (Xandros'' default, so it should be well supported)? I know "real" Debian packages almost always place themselves in the menus of the various desktop environments and "root menus" (as seen in Window Maker, Fluxbox, et cetera) and as far as I was aware Xandros relied largely upon "real" Debian for its packages (with notable exceptions).

For some "lowest level" examples of how to find out what''s in a package:
Deb: "dpkg --contents something.deb"
RPM: "rpm -q --list something.rpm" (untested)

You can just open them in some certain archive programs for a glimpse too.

quote: Original post by flukus
One of the other problems was when I grudgingly attempted compiling programs from the command line, xandros doesn''t appear to have the files set up where makefiles expect to find them.

Can you give us a "real world" example of what happens? It''s probably easy to fix. If you''re talking about "/usr" versus "/usr/local" prefix, that''s easy to solve; Debian makes "/usr/local" a distro-won''t-mess-with-it area of the file system. If you''re talking about missing development files, they''re packaged in seperate "-dev" suffixed packages to cut down on bandwidth and file system usage.

quote:
Does any distribution not let you read from your Windows partitions (and, depending upon the file system, write to it)? If you''re just talking about easy-to-find file manager integration type stuff, I don''t see why Mandrake wouldn''t have it.

I dunno, I tried red hat 9 a while back and it seemed like alot of effort was needed, xandros did it for me automaticly.

quote:
According to Mandrake''s features page, they now use magicdev for that (random details: I think they used to use supermount and that magicdev is what Red Hat created for the same purpose, but I could be mistaken). I tried magicdev out for a while in Debian and it seemed fine.

Cool, so that would let me use the eject button on my CDROM?

quote:
Do the programs not place themselves in the menus of KDE (Xandros'' default, so it should be well supported)? I know "real" Debian packages almost always place themselves in the menus of the various desktop environments and "root menus" (as seen in Window Maker, Fluxbox, et cetera) and as far as I was aware Xandros relied largely upon "real" Debian for its packages (with notable exceptions).

So far caitoo is the only one that has. I''ve tried downloading and installing a couple of game from XN and the never appeared anywhere, if they were on XN then I assume they would be debian packages. XN also likes to handle RPMs but I tried to install a couple of them and neither works.

quote:
Can you give us a "real world" example of what happens? It''s probably easy to fix. If you''re talking about "/usr" versus "/usr/local" prefix, that''s easy to solve; Debian makes "/usr/local" a distro-won''t-mess-with-it area of the file system. If you''re talking about missing development files, they''re packaged in seperate "-dev" suffixed packages to cut down on bandwidth and file system usage.

Ok, when I was trying to install my printer driver I followed the instructions and (having to stop along the way to download the tcl/tk libraries) and I get an error say something like "could not find file./lxintall".

Befor that it couldn''t find the libz file because somehow it wasn''t in the expected directory.

I downloaded the pingus binary, unpacked it and when I try to click on the executable I get an erro saying "pingus could not be found", something about a corrupt header.

Trying to install kstars I got an error saying qt x.x.x or greater not installed. I downloaded and (somehow) succesfully installed but kstars still won''t accept it!

quote: Original post by flukus
I dunno, I tried red hat 9 a while back and it seemed like alot of effort was needed, xandros did it for me automaticly.

I seem to recall Red Hat 9 handled FAT partitions just fine. Due to (likely, paranoid) patent concerns, Red Hat doesn't include NTFS support in their kernels, which may have been the issue (a bit after-the-fact, but RPMs can be found here).

quote: Original post by flukus
Cool, so that would let me use the eject button on my CDROM?

I only had a DVD on-hand, but I checked and magicdev doesn't do the eject-detection bit, just the automatic mounting and desktop icons. Instead, I right click on the 'drive icon' and click eject, which seems simple enough and acceptable for me but I guess it may not be exactly what you're looking for. Supermount is meant to enable stateless removable media (so they don't get locked when mounted), but it appears that Mandrake has stopped using it and relies on only magicdev in 10.0.

quote: Original post by flukus
Ok, when I was trying to install my printer driver I followed the instructions and (having to stop along the way to download the tcl/tk libraries) and I get an error say something like "could not find file./lxintall".

Did Xandros not package the drivers for you? Have a link to the drivers and/or the instructions, maybe I'll take a look at them if it's still a problem.

quote: Original post by flukus
Befor that it couldn't find the libz file because somehow it wasn't in the expected directory.

I don't see why it'd need to be in a specific directory unless a Makefile/script was badly written. If it was looking for a static library (libz.a instead of libz.so, which is pretty common for libz), that would be including in the development package (somewhat obscurely named "zlib1g-dev" in Debian; when you need to find a specific library packages.debian.org and/or apt-cache can be very helpful).

quote: Original post by flukus
I downloaded the pingus binary, unpacked it and when I try to click on the executable I get an erro saying "pingus could not be found", something about a corrupt header.

I'd have to see the exact error, I think. Debian does package its own distribution of Pingus, if that's any help.

quote: Original post by flukus
Trying to install kstars I got an error saying qt x.x.x or greater not installed. I downloaded and (somehow) succesfully installed but kstars still won't accept it!

Were you trying a package or some random binaries? Xandros really should have taken care of that either way (in the latter case, automatically installing commonly used libraries or just making it easy to install anything missing). Debian packages many versions of libqt ("apt-cache search libqt"), so it's likely available under Xandros, if not installed by default.

Rambling: for libraries, only the major number needs to match and the minor needs to be greater-than-or-equal-to (major.minor.micro) for the installed library to be sufficient, so there's no need to get the exact version installed. You really don't need to know most of that, so don't worry about remembering it.

The whole point of a "desktopified" distribution is to make sure these things don't come up often; I'm not sure that Xandros was succeeding in that respect. Not having been there and never having used Xandros, I can't say if it's the distribution's fault or a "user isn't impressed enough into only trying everything one specific way, yet" issue ().



Edit: link is now closed.

[edited by - Null and Void on April 5, 2004 9:44:55 AM]

Ok, I won''t give up with xandros just yet because it probably was my fault for not using debian packages for alot of stuff (although I don''t have a choic for my printer driver and it''s an odd one out that no linux distros support for some reason).

Heres a specific problem though, I went through installing all of the required libraries for the pingus debian package (xandros does seem to be extremely poor when it comes to inclusive libraries, maybe they store alot of them on the second disk with the full version). Anyway, I need "clanlib-vorbis_0.5.4-1-6_i386.deb" which needs "libvorbis0_1.0rc3-1_i386.deb" but when I try to install that it says:

quote:
dpkg: regarding libvorbis0_1.0rc3-1_i386.deb containing libvorbis0:
libvorbis0a conflicts with libvorbis0
libvorbis0 (version 1.0rc3-1) is to be installed.
dpkg: error processing libvorbis0_1.0rc3-1_i386.deb (--install):
conflicting packages - not installing libvorbis0

What do you do to deal with something like that?

quote: Original post by flukus
Ok, I won''t give up with xandros just yet because it probably was my fault for not using debian packages for alot of stuff (although I don''t have a choic for my printer driver and it''s an odd one out that no linux distros support for some reason).

Out of curiousity, what printer is it?

quote: Original post by flukus
Heres a specific problem though, I went through installing all of the required libraries for the pingus debian package (xandros does seem to be extremely poor when it comes to inclusive libraries, maybe they store alot of them on the second disk with the full version). Anyway...

What do you do to deal with something like that?

It sounds like the pingus package you have is meant for Debian stable (where clanlib-vorbis and libvorbis0 exist) while Xandros is based on Debian testing or unstable (where there is no clanlib-vorbis or libvorbis0, instead there''s libclan2-vorbis and libvorbis0a). (I just checked Xandros'' page, it''s based on Sarge, which is currently testing.)

Can you not just use apt-get? I think you''re making this harder than it needs to be . apt-get automagically handles dependencies if the repositories are setup properly and this wouldn''t be an issue. What does Xandros put in "/etc/apt/sources.list"? If everything is setup already, just type "apt-get install pingus" as root and everything will be handled for you.

In the /etc/apt/sources.list:

quote:
deb http://xnv2.xandros.com/2.0/pkg xandros2.0-xn main contrib non-free

And an example of what happens when you type apt-get install xxx

quote:
main:/home/flukus# apt-get install pingus-data_0.5.0pre3-0.1_all.deb
Reading Package Lists... Done
Building Dependency Tree... Done
W: Couldn''t stat source package list http://xnv2.xandros.com xandros2.0-xn/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/xnv2.xandros.com_2.0_pkg_dists_xandros2.0-xn_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn''t stat source package list http://xnv2.xandros.com xandros2.0-xn/contrib Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/xnv2.xandros.com_2.0_pkg_dists_xandros2.0-xn_contrib_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn''t stat source package list http://xnv2.xandros.com xandros2.0-xn/non-free Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/xnv2.xandros.com_2.0_pkg_dists_xandros2.0-xn_non-free_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn''t stat source package list http://xnv2.xandros.com xandros2.0-xn/main Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/xnv2.xandros.com_2.0_pkg_dists_xandros2.0-xn_main_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn''t stat source package list http://xnv2.xandros.com xandros2.0-xn/contrib Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/xnv2.xandros.com_2.0_pkg_dists_xandros2.0-xn_contrib_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: Couldn''t stat source package list http://xnv2.xandros.com xandros2.0-xn/non-free Packages (/var/lib/apt/lists/xnv2.xandros.com_2.0_pkg_dists_xandros2.0-xn_non-free_binary-i386_Packages) - stat (2 No such file or directory)
W: You may want to run apt-get update to correct these problems
E: Couldn''t find package pingus-data_0.5.0pre3-0.1_all.deb

I forgot to do aot-get update

Seems to be working now, I just need to download the pingus data file and hope for the best. There are a couple of reasons for doing it the hard way though. My internet connection is slow and pretty unstable at the moment (just reinstalled xandros, not sure why but the dialup connection is glitchy at first but seems to stabilize over a few day), and I don''t think apt-get handles interupted connections very well. And this way I can keep all the downloaded files in set aside folder in case I need to install them again some time.

would it be advised to set the debian website as a source for packages?

btw, I''m using a z25 lexmark printer, lexmark provide the drivers but their designed for redhat, mandrake and a couple of other non debian distros.

quote: Original post by flukus
There are a couple of reasons for doing it the hard way though. My internet connection is slow and pretty unstable at the moment (just reinstalled xandros, not sure why but the dialup connection is glitchy at first but seems to stabilize over a few day), and I don''t think apt-get handles interupted connections very well.

While I haven''t checked, I think it actually can do a certain amount of download resumption.

quote: Original post by flukus
And this way I can keep all the downloaded files in set aside folder in case I need to install them again some time.

As long as you don''t "apt-get clean" (or autoclean, to an extent) they''ll be stored in "/var/cache/apt/archives" by apt-get.

quote: Original post by flukus
would it be advised to set the debian website as a source for packages?

I''m not sure if Xandros'' packages make that advisable. I was curious if Xandros used Debian''s repositories or its own for just that reason.

quote: Original post by flukus
btw, I''m using a z25 lexmark printer, lexmark provide the drivers but their designed for redhat, mandrake and a couple of other non debian distros.

I see what you mean by their weird drivers. I think the problem you had with them was due to not having the CUPS and Tcl/Tk development libraries installed like their README tells you to (I took a look inside the files the installer creates and uses). However, there would have been additional problems due to their somewhat incompetent driver packaging that are too annoying to fix.

I converted the binaries they include to Debian packages (bypassing the installer problems) and have put them here (I have no idea if they work or if the installer did additional configuration, however). The download page claimed it was for both the Z25 and Z35, so I guess they''re the correct files. Good luck with them, I suppose. If you''d like, you can always write or email Lexmark and ask that they donate the source of the drivers to some project that will make using them transparent.

Related but not really helpful: Debian has a package called "lsb" that attempts to bring it into compliance with LSB (which, one would hope, is what the Lexmark drivers were "really" aimed at).

Thanks alot, although it still didn't work, it goes these error messages:

quote:
Unpacking z35llpddk (from z35llpddk_2.0-3_i386.deb) ...
dpkg: dependency problems prevent configuration of z35llpddk:
z35llpddk depends on libc6 (>= 2.3.2.ds1-4); however:
Version of libc6 on system is 2.3.2-7.
dpkg: error processing z35llpddk (--install):
dependency problems - leaving unconfigured
Errors were encountered while processing:

And similar errors for the cups file.


I'm not sure if emailing lexmark would do much good.

I don't know if emailing lexmark would do any good, my last email to them was greeted with a polite computer generated why only support xxx, yyy and zzz versions of linux.

On the upside I tried installing a couple of games through XN again and they worked this time and got the launch menu items in.

[edited by - flukus on April 7, 2004 10:05:57 PM]

Woohoo, I just got the printer working fine. Thanks again for helping me.

Now I only need to use windows for my .net homework