Eliminate Windows with Mandriva 2009

[Ravikumar Achanta]

The world, I believe, is collectively running slower than it should and has also developed a defeatist attitude towards computers because of Windows and the endless waits and crashes, and updates that do not appear to improve anything. The following write-up is for non-geeks who want to eliminate Windows and enjoy the speed, simplicity and safety of Linux in getting all their tasks done – both at work and at play.

The reality of today's world is that your ownership of a personal computer, and that too running Windows XP / Vista or OS X is assumed. Whether it is a handycam or an iPod or a camera or cellphone, your PC is an essential part of the kit, which the device manufacturer assumes is there. So you need to learn to live with Windows if you want to have fun in your digital life...

That was the way I thought until I got introduced to open source and Linux through Ubuntu free OS distributions. The first thing that struck me was the simplicity and speed of getting tasks done. Any Linux OS – Ubuntu, Fedora (Red Hat), OpenSUSE, Solaris or Mandriva - can be installed on your computer in about an hour or two (depending on your download speeds) without disturbing your Windows file system drive and Windows boot option. You need less than 10GB of disk space which depends upon the distribution and accompanying free software you choose to download.


Is there an alternative to Windows for those who cannot afford a Mac?
Microsoft makes everything very easy with its plug and play capabilities. All you need is to plug in your device and the device driver installation begins from your own hard disk or from the Internet. You need a PC with an OS and various application Software to get tasks done – sending and receiving emails, writing reports, making presentations, copying pictures from your camera to your computer for sharing and printing, transferring your home video shoot to your computer, printing a document, maintaining your contact data and calendar on the PC and replicating it on your cellphone etc. First the OS must recognize your hardware and supply or download its drivers, whether from the local repository (that gets created when you install the OS), or from the Internet. Second you should have the application software loaded. While Vista might come loaded with your new PC, all the application software you need needs to purchased and loaded and subsequently kept updated. As most viruses are written for Windows, you also need a good anti-virus + anti-spam + advertisement blocker + anti phishing software to keep your computer running smoothly. Once you have all this loaded on your machine, you need continued use of a good Internet connection (preferably broadband) to keep everything updated. You spend money up front for the software, and immediately start updating it, and then you need to keep on updating for everything to work properly.

In the past the inability of competing OSs to offer an alternative to Vista (XP) + Microsoft Office + MS Outlook + Virus Guard combination would prevent a migration as far as your work is concerned. Second with any OS other than OS X and Windows, you need to solve all your connectivity problems in getting your devices to interface with your PC yourself. Now this is beyond the purview of a common non-geek user who wants to know nothing of what happens behind the desktop display screen.

You need Windows apparently to get through life – both at work and at play, right? Wrong! After about two months of a lot of experimentation in my spare time, I now have my laptop computer with a Linux OS loaded and have eliminated the need to get into Windows for 99% of my work and play.

Linux + OpenOffice + Evolution Mail + Clam AV + Spamassasin software are a credible alternative to the Vista + MS Office + MS Outlook combination. The good part is that all of this comes bundled with the OS. There is no need to install the mail and office application software separately. The best part is that you do not have to pay for the software. All you need to pay for are Internet time and download charges for the OS download, and of course even with Linux you need to keep updating for improving security and fixing bugs.


Which Linux OS Distribution?
After having experimented with Ubuntu and Fedora I finally settled on Mandriva. Mandriva have created “task” “metapackages” that allow you to download all the software you need to get specific tasks accomplished. At first I got carried way by the way Ubuntu 8.10 (the latest distribution as of January 2009) quickly recognizes hardware. Every Linux beginner would have struggled to get some part of the hardware working. In my case it was the wireless. Fedora 10 needed to be updated immediately to start recognizing my PC's wireless adapter. Ubuntu 8.10 would fire up my wireless soon as the basic distribution is loaded. Very impressive. But I had to go through some travails - plenty of net searches and code downloads – Ubuntu Forums, XDA Forums etc to get to synchronize my contacts and calendar with my cellphone. Internet sharing was another challenge. The following links helped me get off the ground with Ubuntu 8.10 -

http://www.edadfutura.com/en/sincronizar-htc-diamond-con-ubuntu-macos/ for synchronizing my PC contacts and calendar with my cellphone

http://myhowtosandprojects.blogspot.com/2008/11/htc-diamond-as-rndis-modem.html for connecting my PC to internet through my cellphone's GPRS connection.

The joy was however short-lived, as the Internet sharing was very iffy and would sometimes work and sometimes not. For a travelling white collar worker like me this was no-go situation, though the wireless promptly lighting up and connecting effortlessly at airports and public places made it a very tempting option to stay with. So I looked around for a better Linux OS and came to this article - http://www.lazytechguy.com/2008/08/downgrade-to-xp-or-upgrade-to-mandriva.html . This made me give Mandriva a chance. I downloaded the free distribution Mandriva One from http://www.mandriva.com/. Mandriva One comes with OpenOffice, Evolution and Mozilla Firefox as a package to get your spreadsheets, word processing, presentation making, internet surfing, downloading, buying and banking immediately going. It connects to the LAN / broadband network on booting. You can download software that will connect and synchronize your PC Evolution contacts, calender and files by ensuring that you have downloaded “task-wm5sync-gnome” and “task-gnome” almost immediately after ensuring that you have set your firewall from MCC>Security>Firewall to allow your Windows Mobile device to synchronize / connect to the Internet (more details on all this will follow). However it had one major drawback. I just could not get the wireless to light up no matter what I tried after scouring through the Internet - Mandriva 2009's “Errata” and various forums and documentation. I tried almost everything including b43-fwcutter, apsta_mimo.o, bcmwl5, bcmwl6 (pardon the jargon here) drivers from various sources to get Mandriva One to recognize my BCM4312 wireless adapter, but to no avail. I contacted Mandriva Customer Service and was advised to try out Mandriva PowerPack as it had most of the drivers for all the tasks I had mentioned in my email to them. I had not yet got my “work” going on Linux, and thought of the difficulties that might crop up in getting all my “play” going was weighing heavily on my mind.

There appeared to be several advantages with Mandriva:
The Mandriva interface, and no nonsense tight OS that does not allow a root login (thereby not allowing you to mess up the filesystem (like you could in Ubuntu 8.10 and even Windows Vista)
The user friendly Mandriva Control Centre, with most everyday work drivers and software available as “tasks” from the official repositories - task-gnome, task-printing, task-wm5sync - thanks to which synchronizing with my Windows Mobile and Internet sharing worked most reliably.

This tempted me to go for Mandriva PowerPack. I paid 59 Euro and went through considerable pain in downloading about 6GB of the distribution, upgrades and all the “task” software I mentioned above. I got going with almost all my work, except that the wireless still would not light up. I was disappointed to the core and even demanded a refund from Mandriva. About a month later here I am declaring a comprehensive victory. I am done with Windows hopefully for life. Welcome to my “Linux World” and “Digital Life” !

The rest of this article is a description of how I reached the “No need to enter Windows and wait,wait...” status for all my work and play. Victory Declared.


Installation
Mandriva provides no-fuss easy instructions. Just follow the default options after booting with the Mandriva PP CD that you have made after downloading the *.iso file from Mandriva's FTP site. In getting this far you have to follow instructions that you will get in two emails from Mandriva. When it comes to handling of your Windows drives, make sure that your Windows file system partition and personal data partitions (in case you have cared to separate the two) show up in the listed partitions and their format is NTFS-3G and go into “Toggle to Expert Mode”, unmount the partitions if they show as being mounted in /mnt/winc and /mnt/wind. This unmounting will ensure that you do not have to navigate from the root filesystem every time you want to access your documents, music and other media which I advise that you keep in a separate partition from either your windows or your linux filesystem partitions. This article does not cover details of Hard Disk Partition Management which in any case is not a big deal, and you can get it intuitively right by following instructions during Mandriva 2009 installation or from your Windows Control Panel > Adminstrative Tasks > Computer Management > Disk Management if you have Vista loaded.

At a stage during the installation you will have choose Yes or No for “Copying all the software from CD”. Make the choice of copying the entire CD to hard disk. This will save you the pain of having to load the Mandriva PP CD every time you update or download software from the Mandriva official repositories, at a cost of around 4GB of hard disk space.

The next decision point is to choose between KDE, GNOME and CUSTOM. Frankly this does not matter as you can download task-kde, task-kde4, task-gnome and task-xfce to get multiple Graphic User Interface options at any time later, but you will need to make a choice. My choice would be GNOME as it is the most user friendly and evolved option especially for people transitioning from a full “Digital Life” in Windows XP / Vista.

The next choice you would need to make is to load or not load all system upgrades at that time. If you choose to upgrade a default choice of “download mirrors” is made to download all your software from, the network (assuming you are connected to Broadband/LAN which connects to Internet) is “brought up” and you get all security updates from the point of release of the distribution. The problem that could occur here is that any of the default “download mirrors” could be down, or you may suffer a slow Internet connection and the download may get interrupted. Do not worry here, as you can later download all the remaining software from MCC (Configure your computer) icon in GNOME's top panel. Download later through MCC>Configure media sources for software install and updates>Add>. After that you get an option “Update Sources Only” and “Full Set of Sources”. Go for Full set. Overall Linux occupies very little space. My Linux filesystem has grown to 12.5 GB after all required software is loaded. The comparable figure for Windows is about 35 GB. Linux is light and as you will see later it flies.

As soon as you have the basic Mandriva 2009 PowerPack / or Mandriva One loaded you will need to update the OS system software and installed software security updates, if you have chosen not to update during the installation. The procedure is mentioned above. You make your own choice of download mirrors by pressing “ctrl-a” instead of pressing the “Add” tab. This allows you to make a specific choice of update mirror. My personal choices are FTP mirrors from kernel.org from USA and mandriva.com from France. In case any mirror gives you a problem, you can change the choice by repeating above procedure.

Now that all the OS software was downloaded and installed, the time came to sort out other issues. The wireless continued to be inoperative even after installing Mandriva 2009 PP. As getting the wireless on was vital, and along with the software comes three months free Incident Raising and Redressal support from Mandriva, I raised a “Paid Incident” at the “Mandriva Expert” website after due registrations. Initially all I got was a repeat of instructions in “Mandriva 2009 Errata” and other documentation, but my persistence got me in touch with Adam Williamson of Mandriva who was most supportive and after a few days of back and forth and dumps of my system status taken through various commands and bits of code executed from the “Terminal”, I finally got the following solution from Mandriva's Adam Williamson -

“If you'd like to try another angle in the meantime, I've actually just added the proprietary Broadcom driver to the repositories. It's been tested on exactly one system so far - mine - so it's a bit experimental, but you can give it a shot if you like.

You need to enable the non-free/backports repository. Then you run these commands:

su

urpmi kernel-`uname -r |cut -d- -f2`-devel-latest kernel-`uname -r | cut -d- -f2`-devel-`uname -r | cut -d- -f1`
urpmi dkms-broadcom-wl

You don't need to know what the first one means, just do it =). The second one should install the driver; if it tells you the package name is unknown, it just means your repository didn't catch up yet, try again in a few hours.

If it seems to install successfully, then edit /etc/modprobe.conf and make the following changes:

remove any line which mentions 'ssb'
remove any line which mentions 'b43'
remove any line which mentions 'ndiswrapper'

add these lines:

blacklist ssb
blacklist b43
blacklist ndiswrapper
alias eth1 wl

then reboot (or you can remove all the other modules and manually load wl and restart networking). Then check with 'iwconfig' if a wireless interface has now shown up. If not, check with 'lsmod' if the 'wl' driver has actually loaded.

If it has, you can - hopefully - configure it with drakconnect (I haven't tested this bit yet because for me it just works with the settings I previously used for ndiswrapper, it might actually need some code adding to drakconnect, but try it).”

After executing the gedit /etc/modprobe.conf part mentioned above I followed:

MCC > Network & Internet > Set up a new network interface (LAN, ISDN, ADSL..) and just followed the intuitive options and voila! my wireless was up and running capping nearly a month of tribulations. Having invested the money and time, there was no going back. As the wireless was running on Ubuntu 8.10 out of the box, there was no reason why it would not in Mandriva 2009 and my persistence paid off thanks to Adam.

So with this all the hardware was up and running. All my official work was by now getting done only in Windows. No only the “play” part remained. The solutions mentioned in this article are specific to my system and devices, but the approach should be the the same for any system and hardware. Wireless start up is an issue with most Linux distributions because of various licensing issues. Before going further here are my system and hardware details:

Notebook PC Harware & Windows Software Details:
Dell Inspiron 1525, i586 Duo Core Processor, 4 GB Ram, 250 GB SATA HDD, with Windows Home Premium, Office 2007, MS Outlook 2007, Kaspersky AV, iTunes, varoius printer drivers etc.

[SERIAL_FIREWIRE] ohci1394 : Ricoh Co Ltd|R5C832 IEEE 1394 Controller
[NETWORK_OTHER] wl : Broadcom Corporation|BCM4312 802.11b/g
[NETWORK_ETHERNET] : Marvell Technology Group Ltd.|88E8040 PCI-E Fast Ethernet Controller
[DISPLAY_VGA] :Intel 810 and later: Intel Corporation|Mobile GM965/GL960 Integrated Graphics Controller
Bluetooth btusb : Broadcom Corp|BCM2045 [Wireless|Radio Frequency|Bluetooth]


Using Linux for all my Official Work:

I have had no great problems in using OpenOffice Writer, Calc spreadsheet, Impress presentation maker and so on. It was just a question of some relearning to get most of my work of drafting, mailing and presentation and spreadsheet making going.

At a stage Evolution would hang every time I “Reply” or “Forward” and OpenOffice writer would hang when trying to “Save” a document. But it would almost always get back on its own after a few minutes. But soon came a point when I could go no further till the problem was solved. The solution was

System > Preferences > Search & Indexing > Search

> Disable start search & indexing services automatically by un-checking the option
Once this was done Evolution and OpenOffice started working flawlessly and all my office work started getting done in Mandriva Linux. Now the next priority was to get all devices working.
Printing – All usually found printers can be installed by installing the package task-printing:
MCC > Software Management > Metapackage (select in top left drop down) > System (left pane) > Printing (left pane). task-printing is the first package to show up on the right side panel.

I have configured the following printers using MCC > Hardware > Set up the Printer... :
HP 1401 PSC Deskjet Printer – Normal Document Printing
HP Photosmart 7838 – for Photo Printing
Other HP Network Printers etc

Display / Projectors / TV - almost any projector / TV can be configured through System > Preferences > Screen Resolution. I have made business presentations and conducted training sessions at my client offices, using almost any projector available.

Up to this stage in summary, I installed the following software packages after the initial OS installation and mandatory security updates:
task-gnome
task-wm5sync-common
task-wm5sync-gnome
task-printing
ntfs-3g configuration (use this to enable read and write on your ntfs-3g drives through System > Administration > NTFS Configuration Tool)
clam av, spam assassin, bogofilter


Using Linux for all my Play:

Play Devices that I have working only with Mandriva 2009 (no need for Windows) and the various tasks accomplished so far are:

Cannon EOS 350D “Rebel” “Kiss” Camera- Capturing photos from Camera:

The Camera automatically shows up in – Applications > Graphics > F-Spot Manager > Import > Import Source > Canon Rebel XT.... Transferring pictures is now a piece of cake. F-Spot manger comes pre-installed with the initial installation and no special action is required for downloading the software. However you can try some of the other software like Applications > Graphics > GIMP for printing photographs.


HTC Touch Diamond WM6.1 mobile phone - Contact/ Calendar Synchronisation and Internet Sharing

MCC > Software Management > Metapackage (select in top left drop down) > Communications (left pane)

On the right half of the panel a number of packages will show up. Scroll down and select task-wm5sync-gnome. This selection is for a Windows Mobile 5+ phone. If you have any other phone, just select the appropriate task package. Complete download.

After this you need to configure the firewall:
MCC > Security > Set up your personal Fire wall

Select “Windows Mobile device synchronization” and then OK, OK …
Once this is done, connect your Windows Mobile device and reboot. The synce-trayicon will light up on the top left “notification area” . Once this is happens, you can intuitively set the partnership after right click > view device status.

You also then need to set the partnership using Applications> Tools> multisync-gui. Click on the button 'Add', you put a name to the group and add the two plugins that we're going to use:
-Synce-opensync-plugin
- Evo2-sync
By clicking on plugin, in each of the plugins you can see the configuration. In the evo2-sync that we can do with Addressbook, Calendar and Tasks as the synchronize data. In synce-opensync-plugin, just copy paste the following in the window:
<config>
<contact></contact>
<todos></todos>
<calendar></calendar>
<file>/My Documents/</file>
</config>

You can now synchronize your mobile phone contacts, calendar, files and tasks with Evolution by clicking on the “Refresh” button in the multisync-gui window. In doing this, make sure that the first time you sync, either the PC Evolution or the Mobile Phone Outlook Contacts and Calendar should be completely empty. If both have data you will have a mess up with duplicate records.

Internet sharing should happen out of the box, by making the appropriate settings and selections on your mobile phone. Mandriva's task wm5 and its associated packages basically do in Mandriva 2009, automatically what needs to be done manually by following instructions at the following links in the case of Ubuntu 8.10:
http://www.edadfutura.com/en/sincronizar-htc-diamond-con-ubuntu-macos/ for synchronizing my PC contacts and calendar with my cellphone
http://myhowtosandprojects.blogspot.com/2008/11/htc-diamond-as-rndis-modem.html for connecting my PC to Internet through my cellphone's GPRS connection.


Audio CD ripping to mp3

I tried various options. What worked best was a software called “Grip” .

MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down)

Enter grip in search window . This will bring up grip. Select the package and then Apply to download grip.

The enter lame in search window. This will bring up various lame packages. Select twolame and
libtwolame0

Applications > Sound & Video > Grip

Load the Audio CD to be ripped. The tracks will now show up in the tab Tracks. Select the tracks that you want ripped.

Config > Encode > Encoder . Select “lame” from the drop down menu.
Config > Rip > Ripper . Select (cdparanoia) . Possibly this will be the default option.
Config > Rip > Options . Select Delay encoding until disc is ripped

Then Tracks > Rip. The mp3 tracks will automatically get created in your /home/home directory/mp3


Multimedia packages: the “PLF” repository for mp3 and mp4 ripping and other tasks

In case you do not find the packages twolame and libtwolame in your repository, thanks to Mustakim of Malaysia (http://mustakim.blogster.com/mandriva-2009-how-to-urpmi-121008153900 ), you can the following:


urpmi.addmedia --distrib --mirrorlist 'http://plf.zarb.org/mirrors/$RELEASE.$ARCH.list'
urpmi --auto-update

urpmi vlc dvd+rw-tools libdvdcss2 libdvdnav4 libdvdread4 vlc-plugin-dvdnav faac gstreamer0.10-faac libfaac0 libquicktime-faac faad2 libfaad2_0 xine-faad libquicktime-faad mencoder wine playonlinux umtsmon ffmpeg

urpmi java-1.6.0-sun-plugin java-1.6.0-sun totem-mozilla mozilla-plugin-vlc wmwebcam webcam_server camorama kmplayer mplayer dkms-squashfs dkms-squashfs-lzma hfsplusutils hfsutils

The above will ensure that you have a lot of the multimedia codec software you will need for mp3 and mp4 playback. It will load vlc player, ffmpeg, faac, faad and also provide access to “lame” packages in the plf repository which is different from Mandriva official repositories. Once the above commands have been run, the plf repository opens up for use in
MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down)
Search for lame again and this time the plf version should be available.
I am still unable to use the totem Gnome default media player. Apparently some codec is missing. You can try your luck with win32-codecs-1.9-1plf2009.0.i586.rpm which should now come up in search:
MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down)
Enter win32 in search window . This will bring up win32-codecs-1.9-1plf2009.0.i586.rpm. Select the package and then Apply to download.
You could also download gnome-mplayer. This provides a Gnome GUI for the mplayer you have already downloaded through Mustakim's lines above. Another excellent player is kaffeine. All this can be downloaded through MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down)

With kaffeine, vlc and gnome-mplayer you can play any media file mp3, mp4, avi, mpg, dat and so on. ffmpeg, faac, faad are other key packages that you need for mp4 encoding (ripping) and decoding (playing). If you have followed the above sequence you have them all.

To play multimedia files using gstreamer-based players like Totem you also need gstreamer plugin. Search for gstreamer after MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down). From the entire list of gstreamer plugin select what you need. You could download the whole set after factoring in compatibility of different versions. In any case you will get an incompatibility message and will have to deselect the offending package.

mp4 playing on PC
This was by far the toughest challenge. Without the plf repository mentioned above and Mustakim's blog, I could not have surmounted this challenge. No linux player totem, kmplayer / gnome-mplayer, vlc, kaffeine will play mp4 unless faad and ffmpeg work well. Similarly encoding to mp4 which is vital for iPod video play is just not possible without faac.
This is because both decoding and encoding the AAC audio format usually used in MP4 files is covered by a patent in the U.S., so Mandriva cannot safely include the faac / faad tools in its official repositories. Using these tools in the U.S. without a valid patent license is illegal. The same concern applies to most other packages in the PLF repositories. There are also copyright issues in at least the U.S. and E.U. regarding the 'libdvdcss2' and 'win32-codecs' packages.

Capturing Video from my Sony DV Handycam DCR TRV 19E and converting to mp4
You may have Kino already loaded as part of the distribution's packages. With this you can create .dv, .avi (type 1 and type 2) files from feed coming from your handycam. You need to run Kino as root if you encounter any problems.
Converting from avi to mp4 and a host of other conversions
Download handbrake_0_9_3_1_i586_rpm_zip_17059.zip from http://omertron.com/pch/node/73
Unzip and run urpmi HandBrake-0.9.3-1.i586.rpm from terminal as root
Handbrake should appear in Applications > Sound & Video. Run Handbrake
Select a Source file and Destination files and let rip. You can experiment with H264 as well as MPEG-4 (FFMPEG) Video codec to see what works best for you. I am yet to try out other conversions but this seems to be a conversion jack-knife.

iPod synchronisation – music and video
MCC>Configure media sources for software install and updates
Select non-free backports, (and main backports and contrib backports as well if you cant find banshee 1.41. Be sure to unselect them after this operation to prevent unwanted updates that will make your system unstable.
MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down). Select the set of packages for Banshee 1.41 - banshee, banshee-ipod, banshee-mtp, banshee-mirage. Apply and download.
Connect your iPod. Autoplay will throw up the Banshee Option. Select the option with Banshee
Continue just as you would with iTunes
Banshee will synchronise your music and videos. Other players like Rythmbox, Amarok etc will not synchronize your mp4 videos. However Banshee will not synchronize Photos

iPod synchronisation – photos
MCC > Software Management > All (select in top left drop down)
Search for gtkpod
Select and download gtkpod
Connect your iPod
Autoplay will kick in showing you options
Select Open gtkpod
Your iPod should show up in the gtkpod iPod directory structure. If it does not the use Load iPod and select your iPod model and fill out the Options
Edit > Repository / iPod Options
Enter /media/”your iPod name” in iPod mount point. You can verify this to see if where your iPod is actually mounted.
Create an iPod database directory and enter the path in iTunes DB backup. The default here is a directory in root which will not open later on when you want to save the photos to your iPod because the programme will not have permissions to mess with the root directory. I found this to be critical. This can be bypassed by starting gtkpod as root. However you might ending up messing up with the Linux file system.
Select photos and wait a few seconds. The photos already in your iPod will show up
Select “Album” and then “Add Album”. You will need to name the album for your iPod.
Select “Image” and then “Add Images”. Follow intuitively
Save Changes and Eject iPod and you are done – your iPod is now loaded with the photos you have added.

That completes my story of transition to Mandriva Linux 2009 from Windows Home Premium on my Dell Inspiron 1525 machine with all my Devices for Work and Play working with Linux. Victory Declared.

If you have the same hardware as mine. This article could get you going immediately with minimum fuss. You will need to experiment a bit around the above approach if your hardware is different.

Now are you ready for Linux?

[Ravikumar Achanta]

Couple of notes: you could link to
http://wiki.mandriva.com/2009.0_Synchronization for instructions on
synchronization - as noted there, I find KitchenSync rather easier to
work with than multisync-gui (you don't have to manually create the
Evolution configuration, for instance). The page has instructions for
Windows Mobile, Blackberry and Nokia devices. As I did all the packaging
and documentation for the synchronization stuff I'm happy it works for
you! Regarding one change I made - installing task-wm5sync-gnome
automatically installs task-wm5sync-common, there's no need to manually
select both.

The instructions you got for adding PLF repositories were a bit wrong, I
corrected them. They also install quite a long list of packages, some of
which seem a bit odd, like 'wine' and 'playonlinux' which you'd only
need for playing Windows games, they're not to do with media playback at
all. You could alternatively link to http://easyurpmi.zarb.org , which
is a nice web front end for adding repositories, including PLF.

Totem is a gstreamer-based player, so it should work with the
appropriate gstreamer plugins enabled. I edited that part a bit for you.
What's going on here is different multimedia playback frameworks. Take
faad, for instance.

Let's look at all the packages related to faad:

faad2
faad2-xmms
gstreamer0.10-faad
libfaad2-devel
libfaad2-static-devel
libfaad2_0
libquicktime-faad
xine-faad

libfaad2_0 is the package which contains the actual decoding-AAC code.
the -devel packages you can ignore, they're for people building code
only. faad2 is an actual standalone command-line decoder app.
gstreamer0.10-faad is a layer between the actual decoding library -
libfaad2_0 - and the gstreamer multimedia framework. For any player that
uses Gstreamer as its playback framework, this is what you need to make
it work; it's not just enough to have libfaad2_0. faad2-xmms is the
plugin for XMMS to make it work. The other two are similar:
libquicktime-faad is the interface layer for libquicktime, so any
libquicktime-based application would need it (I don't know what these
are...), and xine-faad is the layer for the xine multimedia system, so
any xine-based player - like older versions of Kaffeine, or xine-ui -
would need this one installed.

Finally, some apps just build the code into themselves - so you need the
actual package for that app from PLF before it'll work. So there's
several different things you might have to do to make AAC decoding work,
depending on the app:

If it builds the code into itself, you just install the version of the
app from PLF: e.g. mplayer

If it interfaces with libfaad directly, install libfaad2_0

If it's gstreamer-based, installed gstreamer0.10-faad

If it's xine-based, install xine-faad

this is kinda the same for any other codec handled with plugins: what
package is needed depends on how the player you're using works. If
you're not short on disk space it's probably easiest just to install
everything with the key phrase in its name.

Hope you find this useful!

[Ravikumar Achanta]

I received a private email from Adam Williamson about the superiority of Kitchensync over Multisync for synchronizing my HTC Touch Diamond WM6.1 mobile phone.

I had tried Kichensync earlier during my Ubuntu days but have woken up to it again. Kitchensync needed no configuration when I switched to it. It will not need the code at the end of the webpage http://www.edadfutura.com/en/sincronizar-htc-diamond-con-ubuntu-macos/ after you select the plugins Synce-opensync-plugin and Evo2-sync.

I have switched to Kitchensync.

[teknokraft]

You've been nominated for Tips & Tricks!

[dubigrasu]

deleted with apologies, I guess I am still sleeping
_________________
My name is grasu......dubi grasu.

[teknokraft]

Um, methinks you're a bit mixed up - they're weren't removed. They're in this thread.

[dubigrasu]

thanks Tekno, I'll delete it ...mixed up a lot
_________________
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[Ravikumar Achanta]

Thanks for the nomination though I think I should be the one receiving all the tips and tricks.

[Aristarchos Papadopoulos]

This is really a great guide!

[Jeremy-Bailey]

mandrake 10.1 and suse 10.0 or 1 did it for me back in '06 (read my signature)

I have my mom and a friend on Linux now (both are using Mandriva 2008 Spring, which I am using as well).

I am not too crazy with 2009. don't like it.
but spring may be okay. Spring editions always seem better, to me anyway.
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[AnshulJain]

Ravikumar,
If you're from India, can you consider submitting this great writeup for the "Linux For You (LFY)" magazine? It would b a great starting point for introducing Mandriva to the otherwise Fedora and Ubuntu-obsessed Linux crowd in India.

-Anshul

[SrikarGottipati]

Excellent writeup Ravi Kumar. That was pretty elaborate n helpful

[Jeremy-Bailey]

yes, very nice and helpful article.
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[Ravikumar Achanta]

Have installed Mandriva 2009 Spring, but am not sure if the 2009 Power Pack license I purchased earlier is valid. Anyway I found that I could re-install install the Power Pack over Spring 2009 edition and therefore have powerpack as well as spring 2009.
Linux is still my jackknife, though I am running a triple boot with Vista, OSX and Linux. I am enjoying the best of everything I guess.

[Ravikumar Achanta]

Still can't get Vista out of my system as Linux and OSX refuse to work with some LCD projectors to be found at clients end, conference venues etc.
Its a pity.

[adr-mdk]

Handbrake, the great DVD to MP4/MKV trancoding software is now available here for Mandriva:
http://www.linuxtech.net/downloads/handbrake_mandriva_rpm.html

There are RPM packages for 2008.1/2009.0 and now also for 2009.1 available.

[Ravikumar Achanta]

Does it help in managing output to diplay units as well? I already have handbrake, but will check this new source as well.

I am looking for something that will ensure that my computer recognizes, any projector that I connect to it, when I am running Mandriva 2009.1.
Ravi

[Germ]

handbrake is also in the mandrivauser.de repository.
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[adr-mdk]

[Ravikumar Achanta]

I started tinkering around with my Linux this weekend as for some reason Firefox 3.0.11 crashed and reinstalling would not work. Not knowing what to do I decided to do a clean install and tried all various things. There are learnings and there are questions:

I realized that the Power Pack 2009 I purchased in Oct 2008 was as good as junk. I had loaded Spring 2009.1, but as did not want to loose any goodies that were supposed to be part of the 2009 PP I had purchased earlier, I had loaded 2009 PP over 2009.1 so that difference files would be there with me as 2009 versions.

As everything is now upgraded to 2009.1, the 2009 powerpack with its local repository of 2009 rpms is probably not of much use. I had earlier tried upgrading from 2009 PP to Spring 2009.1 after getting an upgrade notification, but ran into various issues of bad rpms etc and had to abort a number of times.

My entire weekend got consumed in getting a good 2009.1 Mandriva Linux with all my applications on to my Linux partition, sorting out the issues, so much so that I contemplated junking Mandriva and going for Ubuntu 9.04. Finally I think I have managed to get my 2009.1 with all my applications back, but I had to individually urpmi various files that were skipped due to badrpms etc. Luckily the error messages were clear and I could copy paste names of files to urpmi into the terminal. But if I could find a good rpms from the terminal, I wonder why the same did not happen through the MCC>Software Management> Install & Remove...

[Dan Cihon]

I too have moved away from Windows completely at home.
Mandriva 2009.1 64bit
Main programs I use:
Evolution
Open Office Org
Songbird for IPod sync and MP3 management.
Firefox
KDE
K3b

One thing I can't get working is my Webcam with Skype which happens to be a Microsoft one. Looking for a good replacement that works with Skype.

My next project is to convert a large MS Access Database about 8mb in size with many Queries, Forms and Reports. Not sure what I am going to do here.
This looks like too big a task to tackle.
Will take any suggestions.

I say Linux forever.

[Troy Pulk]

[Dan Cihon]

That didn't work.
I opened base.
clicked on the .mdb file and it tried to open it in Writer.
What do I try next?

[Troy Pulk]

[nickcst]