Category: Linux

Mandriva Cooker (2010.0) opened

Posted on by Frederik

Since Friday the cooker repositories, which will lead to Mandriva 2010.0 in 6 months, are open again. In only 3 days about 400 new package releases were made, mostly new upstream versions which came out during the last month while the cooker repository was frozen.

Some of the more important or interesting changes in Cooker include:

  • KDE is being updated to a 4.3 development snapshot. Expect lots of new features but also many new bugs. Information about KDE 4.3 can be found in the feature plan. The KDE audio player Amarok was updated to version 2.1 beta 1.
  • Firefox was updated from 3.0.8 to 3.0.10
  • XFCE was updated from version 4.6.0 to 4.6.1
  • WebkitGtk was updated to version 1.1.6 (read Gustavo Noronha’s blog for info on what they are working on) and the Midori web browser was updated to latest version 0.1.6, including download support. Midori is becoming a more and more complete browser for less powerful systems.
  • nspluginwrapper 1.3.0: this should improve performance a bit with the Flash plug-in. Hopefully it might also fix some stability problems, but I’m afraid that’s rather unlikely.
  • Nexuiz 2.5: many improvements in this first person shooter, including new weapons, a new game mode, more eyecandy,..
  • Updates to the Telepathy stack: thanks to the new telepathy-gabble, Empathy now supports file transfer over XMPP/Jabber.
  • GMime updated from 2.2 to 2.4, which has a modified API. Lots of applications will need to be modified.
  • Mono 2.4: this includes many performance improvements
  • Bash 4.0 includes many improvements for shell programmers, such as support of associative arrays

For all changes, you can read the Changelog mailing list archives.

Why prefer Mandriva over another distribution?

Posted on by Frederik

Yesterday someone asked on a Dutch website the same question which comes back on sites like Slashdot every time a new Mandriva release is announced: what is the the advantage of Mandriva above other distributions like Ubuntu, OpenSUSE and Fedora.

This made me think and so I wrote down a couple of reasons why I use Mandriva on my desktop systems.

10 advantages of Mandriva above other Linux distributions

  • The default graphical theme in Mandriva looks much better than Ubuntu’s brown mess.
  • All graphical configuration tools are centralized in the Mandriva Control Centre.
  • Mandriva has some unique configuration tools, such as msec which permits you to change advanced security settings from the GUI.
  • Mandriva makes it very easy to install 32 bit libraries and applications on the x86_64 version. In Ubuntu some of the more important 32 bit libraries can be found in the ia32-libs packages, but if you need something else which is not in there for whatever reason, things become more complicated and messy: you can for example extract the libraries by hand from the 32 bit deb package and install them in /usr/lib32, or you’ll have to create a complete 32 bit chroot. In Mandriva you can simply install packages from the 32 bit distribution on the x86_64 release by means of the standard console or GUI installation tools.
  • (shameless plug) The program menu is much nicer if you have installed KDE and GNOME together on your system (in Ubuntu and other distributions you will get very long menus containing lots of KDE and GNOME applications mixed together.
  • Mandriva’s booting times is about the fastest possible for a generic distribution thanks to Speedboot
  • KDE as shipped by Mandriva is generally a bit more stable and polished than in Ubuntu
  • Mandriva’s GNOME corresponds more to the default upstream GNOME than for example in OpenSUSE (e.g. by default it does not use that messy Slab menu)
  • Very flexible graphical installer in the Free and Powerpack editions for people who want a more complete and custom installation than the one from a standard live cd
  • Mandriva’s development community is very open and accessible, eg. via IRC and mailing lists. If you do a little bit of effort, it’s pretty easy to become a Mandriva package maintainer yourself and to integrate your contributions yourself in the distribution.

Some disadvantages of Mandriva

  • Security updates are sometimes a bit later than other distributions and for some packages even completely missing. It has to be said that these are mostly not too important security problems and I’m not aware of any problems this has caused for anyone in practice. Also bugfix updates for some reported problems are sometimes late or not done at all.
  • While the graphical themes are much better than Ubuntu’s in my opinion, I still think they cannot beat the upstream KDE and GTK+ themes.
  • The Mandriva configuration tools sometimes have annoying bugs or do not have the best looks possible.

Personally, I consider Mandriva and Debian as the best distributions available. I think Ubuntu is overhyped a lot and does not offer much (if anything?) you cannot do with Debian. I also think Debian’s distribution model consisiting of the Stable, Testing and Unstable distributions is great and makes it possible to have a pretty stable and “rolling” distribution with fairly up to date software at any time. However, the fact that I can directly contribute my own improvements to Mandriva and the fact that installing 32 bits stuff on x86_64 is dead easy, make tthat Mandriva is still my preferred choice on desktop systems.

Anyway, the choice is up to you!

Smolt in Mandriva

Posted on by Frederik

Some time ago, I introduced a package for Smolt in Mandriva Cooker. Smolt is a tool developed for Fedora which collects information about all your hardware and submits it to a central database. On the smolts.org website, people can view all hardware entries and indicate which one is working OK for them. The database is also coupled with a wiki, where extra instructions can be written to get the hardware working. Smolt is used by default already for some time in Fedora and also in OpenSUSE.

To install the Smolt package in Mandriva 2009.1, run urpmi smolt or use the graphical software installer to install the smolt package. There is also a smolt-gui package, but unfortunately this graphical front-end has not been updated recently anymore and because of that it’s missing some crucial features. You can use it to submit your hardware profile, but the GUI will fail to communicate you the password you need to indicate which hardware is working on smolts.org. To get this password, you need to use the command line tool smoltSendProfile. smoltSendProfile will show you all information that will be sent, and after your confirmation it will submit this hardware profile to smolts.org and it will give you the URL and password needed to edit the information.

It’s also a good idea to update the information in the database now and then, for example when you change some piece of hardware in your system, update your OS and/or start using a new kernel. The smolt package adds a cron script in /etc/cron.d/smolt which will update your hardware profile once a month. However, it is not activated by default. To activate it, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/smolt and set ENABLE_MONTHLY_UPDATE=1.

Updating to Debian Lenny

Posted on by Frederik

Last week-end, Debian Lenny 5.0 was finally released. I use Debian on most servers I manage at work. A few of them were already using Lenny when it was still the testing branch, but most are still on Debian Etch. So this morning I decided to test upgrade one of the less critical Etch systems to Lenny. That system is only used to store back-up files from other systems, so it would not be a problem if that machine was off line for a couple of hours.
According to the release notes, you should rather use aptitude instead of apt to upgrade, so that’s what I did. All went well, until suddenly the package upgrade hung while installing new udev configuration files. I could Ctrl-C the process to continue, but from that moment on, more and more post installation scripts started hanging and had to be interrupted.

I noticed that also simple commands, such as ps and getent passwd were hanging too and that I could not log in via SSH anymore. Fortunately, the existing SSH connections continued to work, so I was not locked out yet.

I straced getent passwd and noticed that it hung while trying to connect to the remote LDAP server. The problem was apparently that Lenny’s libnns_ldap tried to connect via LDAPS to port 389, while LDAPS uses port 636 by default. It seems that you need to specify the port number 636 now to make LDAPS work right, so for example: ldaps://remote.host:636. I fixed this in libnss-ldap.conf and pam_ldap.conf, and then I could finish the upgrade without any problem. Apparently this is a known problem.

So definitely modify your configuration first if you are using LDAP authentication and want to upgrade to Lenny. I should probably also fix my nsswitch.conf so that applications don’t start to hang if the LDAP server is unreachable…

In spite of this problem, the whole upgrade was done in less than 1 hour. Without that problem, I guess it would have taken about 20 minutes less. Quite impressive!

Updated system to 2009.1 beta/Cooker

Posted on by Frederik

Yesterday, I updated my system at home from Mandriva 2009.0 (with lots of personal backports, such as GNOME 2.24.3) to Mandriva Cooker, which rougly corresponds to beta 1 now.

I used urpmi to do the update. There were a few problems. Luma and anjuta2 still needed a rebuild (for new python 2.6 resp. binutils), so I submitted new releases of these packages to the repositories. Then the python 2.6 update would cause removal of some python packages, because the update of the python-devel packages was not done smoothly by urpmi. I submitted a a bug for that problem.

All in all, it’s a nice improvement over 2009.0. My system feels much more responsive now. I could remove the work-around I needed before to get snappy 2D X performance with my NVidia graphics card, and also Firefox and other applications seem to work more smoothly.

Evolution was still slow when using my slow IMAP server, but I could improve things a lot by cleaning up my IMAP mail folders a bit. Liferea, in the past my favourite RSS reader, still remains unusably slow in the 1.5 branch, which is probably caused by sqlite and which is a known problem. GNOME’s screensavers are broken and the invisible CPU frequency applet problem is back. The volume mixer is not working anymore if you don’t use PulseAudio, which is a rather notorious problem. GNOME’s Desktop icons are a bit smaller now. You also should not trust GNOME’s calculator, because it seems to give erroneous results. Compiz currently is also rather broken for me: Emerald is very unstable and gtk-window-decorator only displays a grey area instead of a the GNOME window decoration.

When enabling speedboot, I had the problem that X was started before dkms had rebuilt my NVidia drivers and it seems the powernow-k8 module (which I configured in /etc/modprobe.preload), was not loaded. I’ll need to verify the latter problem, and report those two problems.

KDE 4.2 seems to have improved over the previous versions. The fact that a folder view can be used as the desktop, finally brings back the feature we are used too from all other desktops, including previous KDE series. I also noted that kscd is still as ugly as before. However, I’ll probably remove KDE completely from my system soon. I don’t use it anyway, except for taking a quick look at it like now, and I have the feeling my bug reports (mostly about missing features and usability problems), don’t lead to much fixes anyway.

Apart from those mosly smaller problems, the OS is already very usable for me, even with the 2.6.29-rc5 TMB kernel which I’m using.

Data recovery from a USB key

Posted on by Frederik

Some time ago, somebody from my work had problems  reading files from a USB memory stick. In Windows, she just got the message that the disk was not formatted and so none of the files could be accessed anymore.

I checked the disk in Linux. The kernel still found a partition on the disk, but it was not mounted automatically. I tried to mount it by hand, but that failed. Then I decided to run TestDisk, to verify the partition table was really correct. I used dd to copy the whole disk to an image file on my hard drive, because I prefer not to do these kind of experiments on the original disk: you never know it makes things worse than they are already. If that happens,you can always go back to the original situation then if you used an image. So I ran TestDisk on the image file, but it did not found anything more.

Finally I decided to try PhotoRec. I had never used this tool before, but I knew it was supposed to be able to recover pictures from corrupted memory cards from digital cameras. A memory stick is not really a memory card for a digital cameara, but in the end it’s all storage, so I guessed there was a fair chance that it could do something useful here too. So I ran this tool on the image file, and it recovered lots of files! Not only image files, but Word documents, PDF files, and others! Because the File Allocation Table was damaged on the disk, of course the original metadata (read: file names) could not be recovered, but at least it recovered a big part of the data itself.

So I can really recommend this tool. It’s not only useful for digital cameras, as the name might suggest, but can work on all kind of disks. Definitely a utility to try if you need to recover some files!

Various things

Posted on by Frederik

A bit of various things I quickly want to write something about:

Mandriva (1)

Mandriva decided to end the contracts of at least Adam Williamson, Mandriva’s community manager and Oden Eriksson, maintainer of the Apache, MySQL, PHP stack and other related packages. I’m disappointed to see that all the trouble Mandriva has gone through during the past years, still has not ended yet and that people who play such an important role for the distribution, have to leave the ship now. This has triggered a heavy reaction from the community now, with a public letter to the CEO being written, an online petition and people deciding not to spend money anymore to Mandriva, but instead spent it on other free software projects.

While I totally agree with the support for and the solidarity with the people who are victim of these cost cutting, and while I think that this definitely was not the smartest move from the management, I’m not sure these actions are really a good idea. I fear that it’s only a matter of time, until the big sites will start to pick up this story, resulting in yet more negative publicity for the distribution, which will definitely not help preventing this kind of trouble in the future. I can already imagine the style reactions this would provoke on Slashdot: “Mandriva is dead, I left them years ago for X”, “Does anybody still care about Mandriva?”, “Now competitor X can hire them!”,… Now of course, if the management had not decided to end the contracts of these people, this would never happen… Actually I was doubting for that reason if I really wanted to post this here on my blog, but on the other hand: this blog is not that popular anyway, so, it won’t make it worse than it already is :-)

I’m not too sure what to expect from Mandriva in the future. The lack of manpower has always been a problem, and this will only become worse now. Especially seeing that most Mandriva employees are currently working on OEM stuff, and almost the whole Cooker distribution is now maintained by the community. Even big updates like KDE 4.2 beta, X.org 1.5 and others, are almost entirely being done by the community. While there is nothing wrong with a community based distribution (I’m thinking of Debian), together with those contract endings it gives me the feeling that the community is more and more seen as a cheap way of distribution development for the benefit of the company.

Mandriva (2)

Today a broken Evolution update was released as an official update for Mandriva 2009.0. It’s disappointing that there are not better QA procedures to prevent such a major breakage. Packages were just being uploaded to the updates repository, while these updated package did never get even the most basic testing. These kind of serious problems together with the many other annoying and sometimes major problems in 2009.0, make that I really cannot recommend this release for normal computer users. KDE 4 is too unstable and unfinished (even the 4.1.3 update does not fix that. The first time I started KDE after the update and clicked on the Mandriva menu button in the panel, plasma crashed…), even GNOME has annoying flaws (the gnome-screensaver-dialog hang when the screen is locked is a major annoyance for me, because I hit this problem numerous times a day), OpenOffice.org is still an RC version with known and fixed bugs,…

Hifi stuff

Speaking about music, it’s really time that I get some decent hi-fi gear, because my old stuff is actually crap and barely works anymore. I need a stereo amplifier, tuner and a pair of loudspeakers. I’m tempted by the Focal Chorus 816V speakers, which seem to get positive reviews, together with a Marantz amplifier (I have some experience with them, and like them a lot). I was thinking of a Marantz PM8003, but I don’t think it’s yet available here, and I really need something now. Either I could get the older PM7001 KI, or just the PM7003, about which I read some positive comments on a Dutch forum. The Denon PMA-1500AE could be yet another alternative. I’m not sure about this yet, so if anybody has any comments or experience, you’re welcome :-)

Last week I ordered the tuner already. It’s a Marantz ST7001 DAB tuner. While I’m quite skeptical about the quality of DAB (160 kbps MPEG 1 Layer 2 defnitely cannot be CD quality), and DAB reception quality could be difficult here (it’s very realistic that there will be drop-outs in the signal now and then, so maybe I’ll need to try with a better antenna), I can always fall back to plain FM with this system.

Using KVM on Mandriva 2009.0

Posted on by Frederik

Introduction

My new Dell Latitude E6400 laptop, is my first system which support hardware visualization. It also has 4 GB RAM, making this an ideal machine to start experimenting with KVM, the kernel based virtual machine system which is now integrated in Linux itself.

In the past I had already used different virtualization systems. VMWare Server is annoying because you have to rebuild the kernel modules by hand each time you install a new kernel and it’s not Free (as in Free Speech). Virtualbox handles the modules rebuild nicely thanks to the use of DKMS in Mandriva, but always randomly crashes on an assert, making it totally unusable for serious work. Also it does not really include a server mode, where virtual machines just run in the background. Xen is especially nice if you have a system which does not support hardware virtualization and you just want to run a paravirtualized Linux in it. However, the host system (Dom0) needs to run a very specific kernel version (normally version 2.6.18, although Debian has a 2.6.26 based one now). OpenVZ is nice for lightweight Linux server containers (some kind of chroot on steroids), but is not a complete virtualization solution.

Because KVM is built into the standard Linux kernel, this means there won’t be any problems with kernel modules which have to be installed separately. It’s a complete virtualization system which means that you can run all kind of operating systems on it, like for example also Windows. KVM is evolving very quickly and its performance and features are constantly improving. Thanks to libvirt and virt-manager, it also has a nice GUI front-end which make configuring and managing virtual machines very easy (libvirt and virt-manager also include support for Xen and OpenVZ, but I don’t know how well that works).

Installing and using KVM on Mandriva 2009.0

Before installing KVM, it’s important to verify that the CPU on your system has hardware virtualization support. Start up a terminal, and run


$ cat /proc/cpuinfo

If you have an Intel CPU, you should have vmx in the flags. If you are using an AMD CPU, you should have svm.

It’s best to use KVM, libvirt and virt-manager from Mandriva’s backports repositories. The versions included there, are the most recent ones, and fix a few problems which made networking not work out of the box with the ones included in the standard repositories. So start up the Mandriva Control Center (Tools – System Tools – Configure Your Computer), and in the Software category, launch the media sources configuration tool and enable the Main Backports and Contrib Backports sources by checking the checkboxes.

Before we install the necessary packages, it’s necessary to make a change to udev’s configuration file to prevent the virbr* and vnet* virtual ethernet devices and bridges being configured automatically by Mandriva’s configuration tools. To do so, edit the file /etc/sysconfig/udev_net and add virbr* and vnet* to the BLACKLIST_ALL line if they are not there yet. The line should look like this:

BLACKLIST_ALL="ppp*|ippp*|isdn*|plip*|hso*|lo*|irda*|dummy*|ipsec*|vmnet*|wifi*|
wmaster*|br*|vbd*|vtpm*|vif*|ax*|nr*|rose*|bce*|scc*|virbr*|vnet*"
Then install the kvm and virt-manager packages with the graphical software installation utility or with urpmi. Some extra dependencies will be installed, such as dnsmasq-base, libvirt-utils and python-virtinst.

After the installation, make sure that the libvirtd service is running. You can use the graphical tool in the Mandriva Control Center in the category System – Manager system services, or you can run “service libvirtd status” to verify whether it’s running and “service libvirtd start” to start it.

Now start the Virtual Machine Manager from Tools – Emulators. Choose File – Add Connection and set up a Local QEMU connection. Double click on the localhost/qemu connection in the virtual machine manager, and enter your root password. You can now create new virtual machines by clicking on the New button. To use KVM, choose a fully virtualized system, and choose KVM as hypervisor. If you want to run Mandriva 2009.0 or later in a KVM based virtual machine, you can probably choose Linux as OS type and Ubuntu Hardy as OS variant, because that should give better performance than the generic options.

I currently have Windows Vista and Debian Lenny running in KVM. It works very fast and very reliably. The only problem I encounter, is that sometimes I cannot switch back from my Windows virtual machine to my host system: the mouse and keyboard cannot leave the VNC window anymore and also the Ctrl-Alt keystroke does not release the mouse pointer. The only solution is to shut down the Windows system.

Fix bad performance with NVidia 177.80 drivers

Posted on by Frederik

Since I upgraded to Nvidia’s beta driver series which were supposed to improve performance for KDE 4 (including the now stable version 177.80), my GNOME desktop on my system with a Geforce 6600 GT graphics card, felt a lot slower. It was most noticeable when browsing the web with Firefox. When quickly scrolling a web page with my mouse’s scroll wheel, X started eating 100% of CPU time and the image on the screen started lagging behind a lot. Also just rendering a page seemed to be much slower. Disabling smooth scrolling in Firefox, did not help at all.

Searching on the web, I found out that I’m not the only one with this problem. However, setting the InitialPixmapPlacement to 0 made the Compiz/Emerald window manager crash. I found out that setting InitialPixmapPlacement to 1 also seemed to fix the problem, without compiz/emerald crashing.

So if you also suffer from bad performance in GNOME with the proprietary NVidia drivers, create a script called fix-broken-nvidia.sh in /usr/local/bin with contents:


#!/bin/sh<br/>
/usr/bin/nvidia-settings -a InitialPixmapPlacement=1

Then go to GNOME’s System – Preference menu and start up Sessions. In the startup programs tab page, click on Add, and choose /usr/local/bin/fix-broken-nvidia.sh as the command. Save the settings, and restart X. Firefox now works a lot faster for me: web pages now appear instantaneous and I can scroll web pages without my CPU getting overloaded.

Thanks to NVidia for bringing me such great performance with their new drivers. Out of gratefulness, I’ll make sure my next graphics card is an Intel or ATI one.

Mandriva Linux 2009.0 on a Dell Latitude E6400

Posted on by Frederik

Introduction

A few weeks ago the hard drive in my Apple Powerbook G4 which I was using at work, had died. As this machine was already a few years old, it was already planned to be replaced soon. The hard drive crash only accelerated things a bit.

I wanted a not too heavy laptop with 14″ screen and a high resolution (1440×900) screen and an Intel CPU of the latest generation (style Core 2 Duo P8400/P8600/T9400). Lenovo’s Thinkpad T400 with such a high resolution screen seemed to be difficult (impossible?) to find here in Belgium currently and generally Thinkpads are rather costly here. HP’s Elitebook 6930p did not seem to be shipping in Belgium yet. So in the end, I chose a Dell Latitude E6400. Also a big advantage of Dell, is that I could easily choose in detail which features I preferred, while you are limited to standard models with most other brands.

Specifications

So here are the specifications of the Dell E6400 machine I have now:

  • Intel Core 2 Duo P8400 (2,26 Ghz, 3MB cache)
  • 4 GB RAM
  • Intel G45 chipset graphics card
  • DVD+/-RW
  • 160 GB hard drive
  • Intel based 1Gbps Ethernet
  • Intel WiFI 5300 wireless card
  • Bluetooth
  • SD card reader
  • SmartCard reader
  • Firewire, eSATA, USB, VGA, DisplayPort outputs
  • Dell Simple E-Port docking station

Mandriva Linux 2009.0 on Dell Latitude E6400

On my Powerbook I used Debian Testing (Lenny), because it supports the PowerPC architecture very well and is very stable. I was very pleased with this distribution. Even as a desktop OS, I personally liked it much better than Ubuntu. On this new machine, I decided to install Mandriva because it permits me to follow Cooker if I want and also permits me to create and use custom packages more easily (I’m not too experienced in creating DEB packages).

Installation

I did a network installation of Mandriva 2009.0 x86_64 edition, which I started with a CD burnt from the boot.iso file which can be found on every Mandriva mirror in the install/images directory. I had some trouble in finding a reliable mirror at first, but once I found one, the installation itself went fine. If you are installing from a CD or DVD set, be sure to install all available updates at the end of the installation. By the time you are reading this, this might solve some of the problems I encountered with the just released Mandriva 2009.0 and which I will discuss here.

X lock ups

Once the installation had finished, I booted Mandriva for the first time. Unfortunately, every time as soon as the X server started up, the machine completely locked up though. In the end, this turned out to be a problem with the Intel X driver. A fixed version is currently available in the main/testing repository. If you are suffering from this problem, in the boot loader press F2 with the Mandriva line selected, and then add 3 at the end of the kernel line, in order to start the linux system in console mode. Log in as root, and run

# urpmi http://ftp.free.fr/mirrors/ftp.mandriva.com/MandrivaLinux/official/2009.0/x86_64/media/main/testing/x11-driver-video-intel-2.4.2-7mdv2009.0.x86_64.rpm

to install the fixed driver from testing. Then run

# init 5

to go to init lever 5 (graphical mode).

Speaker noise

Another problem was that as soon as the sound drivers were loaded, a loud noise came out of the speakers. To fix this, open the volume control in LInux, and deactivate the Analog Loopback 1 and 2 switches (in GNOME, you will need to click on the Preferences button first, and check the checkboxes next to Analog Loopback 1 and 2 to show these switches). I also completely muted PC Beep because even on the lowest level, the console beep was still extremely loud.

Kernel choice

Because my laptop has 4GB of RAM, the installer decided to install kernel-server instead of kernel-desktop. However this is not needed if you installed Mandriva’s x86_64 edition. To check whether you are suffering from this problem, run

$ uname -a


If it installed the server kernel, you can install the desktop kernel by running

# urpmi kernel-desktop-latest


The desktop kernel will give you better performance and battery lifetime than the server kernel. Another alternative is kernel-tmb-desktop-latest, which I had also good experiences with.

If you installed Mandriva’s i586 edition, you will need the server kernel to support 4GB of RAM. That’s why you really should try to install the x86_64 edition if you have that much RAM.

Intel VT

Because I want to make use of the Intel VT (virtualisation features in Intel CPUs), I went in the BIOS (press F2 when the Dell logo appears when starting up the machine) and enabled these features. After that, Linux became extremely unstable. Kernel oopses happened during start up, in some cases completely locking up the OS when booting. I could fix this by adding intel_iommu=off to the kernel command line. At the boot loader, again select the Mandriva 2009.0 line and press F2 and add this option. To make this permanently, start up the Mandriva Control Center (“Configure your computer” in the program menu Tools – System Tools), go to the Boot category and choose “Set up boot system”. Click on the next button, and then for all Linux kernel, click on Modify and add intel_iommu=off to the Append field.

Wireless and Bluetooth

After the installation, be sure to also start up the drakroam wireless utility, in order to make it install all needed tools to use the wireless networking card because the installer did not install these by default. To use the wireless network card, don’t forget to enable the wireless functionality with the wireless kill switch at the right side of the laptop. I have the impression that it’s best to make sure this is enabled at boot, otherwise the wireless does not always seem to work when enabling later on.

In order to use the Bluetooth, I had to install the gnome-bluetooth package myself. For KDE, you will need to install kdebluetooth4. The pin can be set in the text file /etc/bluetooth/pin.

Other things

Currently I have not yet tried the SmartCard and SD card readers and I did not succeed yet in setting up a dual screen configuration with a flat panel connected to the VGA output on the docking station. For some reason, xrandr only permits me to use a 640×480 resolution on the external monitor, possibly because it seems to ignore the Virtual lines I added to my xorg.conf. I’ll need to investigate this a bit more to find out what is really going wrong here. Suspending the machine also seems problematic: when I tried this, the machine locked up completely when it resumed.

I did not buy this laptop with the integrated webcam, however according to what I read on the Internet, it should also work out of the box with Linux kernerl 2.6.27, which is used by Mandriva 2009.0.

Conclusion

All in all, I’m pretty satisfied with this laptop. The specifications are nice and the price we got from Dell was nice (much cheaper than the standard prices on the Dell website). The biggest disadvantage of this laptop is that parts of the casing seem to be made of cheap plastic. It does not feel as sturdy as a Thinkpad or HP laptop. Time will tell whether that’s a real problem. The most important things can be get working with Mandriva 2009.0 without too much problems and I guess I will find solutions too for the remaining bits in the near future.

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