Mandriva

[russ0r]

when the newer versions come out, is it like windows where you have to do a complete reinstall and get all the apps again, or do they do upgrade options?

It varies from distribution to distribution. Ubuntu usually lets you do a distribution upgrade without having to reinstall. But some, like Fedora Core I think, will make you reinstall the whole OS. Others don't even have new versions, like Arch which just works on a rolling release.
It's not that big of a deal anyway if you've got everything backed up.

also, due to there being no registry, can you just unplug the linux hard drive and stick it in any other computer and your up and running?

Yeah usually, unless you've got a custom kernel most stuff will just work in another PC IIRC. This is why Linux is so great for USB drives (obviously this depends on architecture; you can't put a 64-bit install in an x86 machine)

 

[Huw]

Yeah Paradisiac, Oxy is right and I apologise if I misled you. There are plenty of people who use RPM seemingly without any problems at all. I was just speaking about my own experience and saying I'm far from on my own in my loathing of RPM.

But yeah, as Oxy said, you've settled on a distro that works the way you want it to and that's by far the most important thing. In a few months you may well get the itch again and go distro-hopping, but cross that bridge when you come to it.

 

[paradisiac]

i did have a few issues with games last night, sometimes they loaded fine, other times i got the window but everything inside it was black, i close it, get a screen refresh, my res goes to 800x600 or something, then i can see the part of the screen where the window was but the rest of the screen is black, then anything you open only opens the size of the window that failed, even though the full screen is in use because if you click on the bottom left corner, the (whatever the equivilant to the windows start button menu) opens, but you can only see the top part of the menu that fits in the failed window part of the screen. have to open konsole blind and type reboot and start again. annoying but only happens on games, so not the end of the world as i wont play games on it, just wondered what they were like.

EDIT : the other slightly annoying thing, but this is probably because i let it decide rather than manually doing it is, i installed it on a 40GB hard drive, clicked on the 'use whole drive' option, but it has assigned 12GB for the install, 20GB for god knows and the rest as a swap file. i know apps and the OS itself are quite small, but 12GB does seem a bit low considering it thinks im going to use 20GB for data or whatever. is this easily changeable, either on this install or by reinstalling?

 

[paradisiac]

well i turned it on this morning and my desktop icons and weather widget have gone
how do i get back my dolphin file manger to my user docs and the wastebin?

 

[paradisiac]

it seems like the user profile is corrupt because if you browse to the /home/***/Desktop folder the icons are there i created a new user, used konsole to copy the the new users folders to the old/corrupt user folder but still the same after logon

 

[Huw]

Are you on KDE 4.x? By default the desktop doesn't act like a "normal" desktop. If I recall correctly you have to right-click on it and select activity settings, then change it to be folder view. Finally tell it which folder to display, in this case /home/<user>/Desktop.

 

[paradisiac]

Are you on KDE 4.x? By default the desktop doesn't act like a "normal" desktop. If I recall correctly you have to right-click on it and select activity settings, then change it to be folder view. Finally tell it which folder to display, in this case /home/<user>/Desktop.

yeh, its all gone horribly wrong the user folders (desktop, music, videos...) have all gone

 

[darude]

I've been a Mandriva 2010 user for nearly a year. Now moved over to Kubuntu 11. There are still bugs with KDE 4.x. But you will learn to work your way around them.

Give Kubuntu 11 a shot. Its part of Ubuntu, and has a much bigger support community.

If you're worried, take backups of your home folder regularly (there are loads of hidden user config files). If you have some free space on your HDD, create a separate partition free and store your Desktop, Documents, Pictures etc in there. Use a symbolic link to link your ~/Desktop and ~/Documents to that spare partition's Desktop and Documents.