If you <I>must </I>have IE, you can run it in wine. If you can't make wine run, there's crossover from codeweavers, which I have so my wife can use office 97. But without a windows emulator, no IE.

Yea I guessed that - Microsoft aren't gonna be too keen to port their software so to Linux!! I still haven't got WINE working fully but I've posted that problem elsewhere, and I would consider crossover except for the fact that I am a poor jobless student and can't afford to go buying software - that's one of the reasons I like linux hehe, I don't have to steal software off Kazaa, I can just legally download it with the honest intention that one day I'll be able to contribute back to the community - I'm learning Pascal on my course at the moment, and I'm gonna start learning Java next year, so you can bet I'll be making my programs available free of charge to the Linux community

I saw there is a download plugin thing for IE that alows tab browsing. I still saw let her use Mozilla and some of the others. They are much better. If I had to use windoze I would still install Mozilla.

That I would mention that.

1 cents worth.

yeah, once mozilla was out, I never used IE again even in windows. And nowadays, I hardly use windows and I still notice that each time I boot XP, some thing or other is broken - it is slowly dying of old age it seems; once it's dead, I'll get rid of it.

So long as your sister just planning to use a browser, email program, chat client and the like, there's nothing much she needs to learn.

As for booting faster, go to mandrake control center->system->drakxservies and disable the things from starting at boot taht you don't need. The biggest culprit is harddrake but there others that you probably don't need - draxservices provides brief description. And then recompile the kernel to get rid of unnecessary modules - makes the finding of module deps a lot faster.

XMMS is capable of using winamp skins.

Why would you want to switch to SuSE? Not that SuSE is bad - it's excellent - but I don't see any reason to swtich from mandrake to suse. If you have hardware problems, those will probably show up again in suse. You're better off waiting for mkd9.2 and install that.

> XMMS is capable of using winamp skins.

Thanks v much for that bit of info I'l go to nullsoft in a min and get some of my favourite skins for winamp

> Why would you want to switch to SuSE?

It's because of MandrakeClub mostly - as I've mentioned above probably I'm a poor student and whilst I have no problem contributing my time to any project I can help on, I can't contribute money because I don't have any! This means that it's harder for me to get updates than it otherwise would be, and this is why I might switch to SuSe or Debian. Out of interest does anyone know whether I can install mdk 9.2 (cooker I think) straight over my current installation (upgrade rather than start over); I'm going to download mdk 9.2 tonight either way, I still haven't tested k3b but it looks like it will work now

this is not true. All updates are free. You can do it from Mandrake control center -> software management -> update

You can install mdk9.2 over the existing install but I'm pretty sure it'll cause headaches. You're much better off doing a clean install. If you have a separate /home partition and maybe partitions for data, you can leave them untouched and use them again.

Really? The reason I came to this assumption was because when updating some packages using the update feature I was denied access to a mandrakeclub ftp which it tried to access, if this happens again I will put more details on here... as for the necessity to clean install, i'm not too bothered by this since I haven't set up much yet and what I have set up I can remember, and I'll wipe out my Windows partitions whilst I'm at it.
In other news, I just tried to use a .wal skin with XMMS and it cannot read them, so I checked the FAQ on the site (www.xmms.org) and it says it doesn't support them, although it does support .WSZ files so maybe these are the Winamp 2 skins? I'll go find out now.

I don't know about mandrake, but from what I've heard and read, all distros should be installed fresh except for the debian based ones and maybe the bsd's. For SuSE that's definitely true. If money is a problem, consider debian. All system upgrades are dealt with much like program upgrades. But you can still compile if the app you want's not in the repository.

Whether k3b works or not may depend on the version. One version (donb't remember the number) sucks, the rest are pretty good. The one in debian sid may be the best.

At the risk of starting a fight, I recommend Firebird over the others. On my hardware it's much faster. Ask your sister if she'll agree to Netscape. It's ok.

Oh yeah, I forgot. XMMS supports winamp2 skins but not the winamp3 skins.

You can't access the mandrakeclub ftp servers, but there are tons of other ftp servers that have the updates and the update function should have given you a list of ftp sites. If you want to get a new list, go to source management (I think that's what it's called - the 4th item in the software management part) and remove the update source.

I do updates this way.

Start thingy then Configuration then Packaging then Mandrake Update. When it downloads the mirrors select the one that starts with carroll.cac.psu.edu. That is the only one that I have gotton to work. The rest must not be up to date. Don't know for sure.

Hope that helps.

I've now got some nice .wsz skins for xmms, all I had to do is save them to usr/share/xmms/skins and change their extension to .zip. Didn't even need to restart the application . I want to know more about Debian, but I'm going to look elsewhere otherwise this thread is gonna go off on a tangent (which is the problem with asking "50 questions at once" as someone said above. That software management part, would I be able to add sites like rpmseek in there or if not what online sources could I add? I'm gonna go try and find an answer to that now... oh and I'm running k3b version 0.8.1 by the way, I'll find out tomorrow morning when I try to burn mdk9.2 (or maybe Debian) whether it works!

Btw if anyones wondering why I don't just wait till I've freshly installed and then carry on upgrading its because I can run into problems today and then I'll have the answers tomorrow, and besides, i like learning all this about Linux, it's beginning to feel very friendly (as people said it would)

a good way of getting software sources for downloading updates, softweare not on CDs,etc for mandrake is here:
http://plf.zarb.org/~nanardon/urpmiweb.php
follow the instructions and you'll have access to tons of stuff for easy download and install. I think right now it is still only for 9.1. though. I'm sure they will update it once 9.2. has been released to the general public.

Hasn't 9.2 been released yet? I've seen it on mandrakelinux.com for download, is it still in alpha/beta stage (it didn't appear to be)

Great site that easy urpmi one, not sure what its doing but it just found a 9mb download which must mean its updating something (lucky I've got ADSL really hehe)

92. is out for club members. I don't think the general public is supposed to get it yet but mandrake screws things up often ... Make sure you don't download the rc2 instead of the final.