About to give up... again !
 

It's funny how that works: sometimes, when a new distro comes out, I read the specs, the new features and the comments and I say to myself: "This is the one" ! So I install it and for the first hour it's always incredible, for the first week it's better than Windows, and after a month, I'm back to Windows !

I guess I'm just tired of spending all my evenings trying to make it do everything I need, reading all the forums I can find, searching the newsgroups and trying every suggestions anybody could give me.

It's been a month now that I've installed Mandriva 2005 LE (10.2), and I think it's about to end...

There's the only 2 things that I just can't get to work (maybe it's no big deal for some, but when it's something you use frequently, it has to work !):

-Using DVDDecrypter and DVDShrink with wine. DVDDecrypter says "No devices detected!" and DVDShrink doesn't want to install saying "Bad folder name". (I have Wine-20050930 - I tried everything I could find in the forums to get this to work)
-Printing multiple pages per sheets (I know it's possible but I don't want to have to create a ps output with everything I need to print... In Windows, I click "4 pages per sheet please!" and that's it).


But don't get me wrong here: I'd love to love Linux...

Any suggestion of another distro that would resolve my problems and not create some others !
So should I go search the forum to find out how to remove Linux and Lilo from my computer or is there some other things I should try ?

What program are you using to print, if you look through the man page for lp you may find an option to allow you to print multiple pages per sheet

Have you search for linux native software that does what DVDdecryptor and DVDshrink do?

It seems a bit drastic to consider giving up on Linux for these two things. Which windows manager are you using? If it's KDE then kprinter has the option you're looking for. Read this

http://iew3.technion.ac.il/CC/Comp_n.../printing.html

When it comes to wine, don't expect everything to work. And the ones that do, don't expect all the features to work. Wine is still very unstable and in constant development. As phil.d.g suggested look for native linux alternatives. If you still insist on trying to make these work with wine, try downgrading the version. I have one program that won't work with any version later than 20030115.

Wow, even Wikipedia talks about installing this! http://axljab.homelinux.org/DVD_to_D...k#Installation

WineHQ discusses it here: http://www.winehq.org/pipermail/wine...il/010279.html

Here's my search: http://www.google.com/linux?q=dvdshr...mozilla-search

There is a native DVDShrink for Linux (http://ozzzy.dhis.org/DVDShrink.html or http://dvdshrink.sourceforge.net/) and its author has conveniently made packages available for Mandrake (http://sourceforge.net/project/showf...roup_id=133818). I've tried it and it works.

Dont give up just yet. This is why dual boot is nice to have.

you might look into streamdvd its a command line tool it has a few dependencies but works fine be sure to read instructions or you'll never get it working.