OK, I installed Mandrake 10 community on my laptop this evening. I've previously had 9.1 and 9.2 working (more or less) on the laptop.

It's basically working OK. So far I'm not really seeing the touted improvements from the 2.6 kernel, I'll have to check what specifics I should be looking for.

I tried first upgrading my existing 9.2 installation. That worked OK, but had a few problems.
1. It got messed up trying to configure lilo because it hadn't linked the kernel images correctly. I sorted it out by booting from Damn Small Linux and doing it manually - not something a newbie would be able to do easily I would imagine.
2. Quanta crashed quite badly when some buttons were pressed (e.g. VPL and Source Editors).
3. It didn't see my USB flash key when I inserted it.
4. It didn't see the CD drive (had it mapped incorrectly, but I couldn't get it working).
3 & 4 probably linked to a message in /var/log/messages
"modprobe : FATAL Module ide-disk not found"
"modprobe : FATAL Module ide-probe-mod not found"
5. I have Doom and Wolfenstein running under xdosemu. After the upgrade, Wolfenstein works but Doom crashes xdosemu.

Due to the device issues and a general desire I had to tidy up my installation a bit I decided to install from scratch. This time I got some different issues (but it is generally working) :

1. Shutdown hanging on message "ehci-hcd USB Bus 3 deregistered"
2. Firefox flash plug-in not working, though Firefox is otherwise fine.
Edited to add : Just checked out the Release Notes and this looks like known issue.
3. Laptop battery monitor not working ("Your computer seems to have a partial ACPI installation. ACPI was probably enabled, but some of the sub-options were not - you need to enable at least 'AC Adaptor' and 'Control Method Battery' and then rebuild your kernel.")
6. Edited to add : Firewire is not even being configured as far as I can tell. The hardware monitor sees the firewire adapter, but there's no message on boot to say it's being configured and it does nothing when I plug in my firewire CD writer (on 9.2 the icon popped up).

However, following the re-install, the USB Flash key & CD Drive works fine and Quanta looks OK too. Edited to add : My mistake. Quanta still crashing happily, but different crashes now.

Doubtless I'll find more issues so I guess so far I'm happy, but with reservations.

Thank' s. Nice and informative post.
I take it you didn't like it enough to update you distribution in your user profile then?

I have a Dell Latitude D600 laptop that I installed mdk 9.2, 9.2.1, and 10.0 Community. Versions 9.2 & 9.2.1 I had the same battery problems you are experiencing. Version 10 detected the laptop batter correctly and the monitor for it installed and works for me. Make sure acpi is enabled and the acpid is running.

Mandrake 10 has the same problem 9.2 did with getting flash to work, which is a missing file. You need libstdc++2.10-2.96-0.83mdk.i586.rpm . Once I installed that file, Flash worked for me in Mozilla Firefox 0.8 and Mozilla 1.6. Real Player and Blackdown java 1.42 all work for in in Mdk 10. Also, the Red Hat version 8 RPM for Yahoo Messenger also installed and worked for me. I also tried a few 9.2 RPMs for programs I use regularly and they also installed fine and worked for me.

BW

I've got a D600 myself - good to know Mdk10 is happy with it.

Life is slowly improving. ACPI was just missing packages - the totally misleading message from the KDE interface had me running down the wrong track for a few hours, but all sorted now.

Firewire is started up at boot, but I haven't tested it's working yet.

Still got to sort out flash, but at least I know where to look now. Still p*ssed off because the 2.4 kernel always hangs on startup and the 2.6 kernel always hangs on shutdown, but such is life - serves me right for having a dodgy cheap laptop I guess. (The startup hang is wierd though, as it happens with all Mandrake 2.4 kernels I've tried but never with Knoppix or DSL).

I have to say that a newbie would probably be thinking what a crock this Linux stuff is by now. Got to get the flash thing sorted soon to stop my son moaning that he can't play his internet flash games.

How did you get acpi working in mdk 10? I am about to install mdk 10 as soon as my CD arrives, I had the same problem and message in mdk 9.2 (partial acpi install etc).

Cheers

Just searched on "acpi" in the package installation screen and installed the two packages that came up (both on CD1) :
acpid-1.0.2-4mdk
acpi-0.07-2mdk

Made sure that lilo.conf had apm=off and apci=on, then rebooted. Definitely a bug that the acpi filesets weren't installed by default on a laptop, if you ask me.

Thanks. I downloaded it from http://rpmfind.rediris.es/rpm2html/m...3mdk.i586.html
and it worked fine. My son is speaking to me again (not sure if this is a good thing ).

For info : My laptop is an Acer Aspire 1310 (or possibly 1315LM - two labels, two model names).

i did exactly the same in mdk 9.2 with 2.4.22 kernel with no luck of getting acpi to show my battery infor, i hope the new kernel will solve this?

Hey guys...

I was having trouble trying to install Flash from the file downloaded from Macromedia, so I happened upon the .rpm flie someone created for Fedora Core 1 and it installs just peachy under Mandrake 9.2 and 10

Grab the rpm at http://macromedia.mplug.org/
now that I just looked on this site a little deeper, there is a version for Mdk 9.1 that should be the closest match for us cutting edge types.

All seems to be working OK now on the 2.4 kernel.

The 2.6 kernel still has three problems on my laptop :
1. Doesn't even seem to see the pcmcia wireless ethernet adapter on bootup.
2. Doesn't shut down cleanly - hangs on echi_hcd USB bus 3 de-registered (as this is the last message, it might be the step immediately after this that it's hanging on).
3. After reaching the KDE login screen, mouse freezes for a few seconds; then works fine. This also happens after logging on and the KDE desktop being brought up.

I'll have more of a play when I have the time, but I guess I'll be sticking with the 2.4.25 kernel for now as I sort of need a laptop that works

I have had 0 luck so far. The pc I'm trying to install on is an nForce 2 board and the install either freezes while creating the partitions or about 5 minutes into installing the packages. Jacked up my old 9.2 install (thankfully I had a backup) that was on the same drive, but different partitions. I am not pleased so far at all esp. since it took almost 3 days to download from the slow torrent stuff. A more official release is due in 4 days, I hope it all works better for me.

Hey!

Problem1: Is mandrake 10 good for me as a Newbie ?

Problem2: Is there any way of converting a NTFS partition to FAT32 partition without losing all files on it ? Would be excellent if possible, but i doubt it.

Thanks

problem 1: mandrake is excellent for a n00b

problem 2: partition magic can convert ntfs to fat32

Had similar issues getting flashplayer working in Firefox... luckily I came across this post:

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/history/151601

Which got me working by typing the following in a console as root:

Restarted Firefox and BAM! Working great! Took me a few hours to find the answer, but that was the only twitch I had found in my clean install of 10.0 Com. Hopefully this will help a few others out there.