Howdy all!
Well, i decided to dump RedHat 9 because of numberous problems be it that I have a Presario 900us Laptop. I migrated over to Mandrake, (read, reformated and installed off 9.2 iso cd's). After getting past the nomce hang (which is on every distro with this laptop), the system worked right out of the box. I was really impressed. I even got the W200 card working (if you need help, shoot me an email, i was amazed at how easy it was with a little help). BUT, I have a few questions:

1. I have a PockeZIP! drive, and for those of you who dont know what that is, it's a pcmcia 40mb removable disk put out by iomega. It works fine when i am root, but whenever I try to access the mount through a normal user, it tells me "access denied". Now, I know why this is happening, but i cant seem to fix it... Here are the steps I have taken so far.

su
mkdir /mnt/zip
chown to my user
chmod to rw access
issue mount command (which i know works, because i can read the device through root)

and everytime, I get "access denied" errors. PLEASE HELP.

2. this relates to an app called urpmi. I've seen everyone rave about it here on the forums, so I figures I would give it a shot. Especially since Mandrake update seems to cop out on me everytime i try to use it. So i installed the RPM for it, and figures out how to use it. All went well for a while... (now, keep in mind that in all of this, I'm trying to switch over to cooker)

When issuing the command "urpmi --auto-select" I was presented with a list of 618 RPM's which happen to be the updated mdk cooker rpm's. It then told me that it would download and install them... So i let it chug along, only to realize that it wont update all the packages.

I keep getting errors like the following:
ftp://mirror.cse.unsw.edu.au/mandrak....2mdk.i586.rpm
installing /var/cache/urpmi/rpms/libkdevelop3-devel-3.0.0-0.beta1.2mdk.i586.rpm
Installation failed:
libkdevelop3 = 3:3.0.0-0.beta1.2mdk is needed by libkdevelop3-devel-3.0.0-0.beta1.2mdk
libkdevelop.so.1 is needed by libkdevelop3-devel-3.0.0-0.beta1.2mdk
libpropertyeditor.so.0 is needed by libkdevelop3-devel-3.0.0-0.beta1.2mdk
devel(libdb-4.1) is needed by libkdevelop3-devel-3.0.0-0.beta1.2mdk

(I have the entire errorlog if you would like to see it, but it's fairly long.)

So eventually it spit me back to a prompt, so i figured the errors were due to dependencies that urpmi couldnt handleat that time. I re-ran the program, and was presented with a list close to 80 rpm's long, (which means that most of the RPM's were installed, ??i thnk??).

Now that I have presented you with all this babbel... here is my question related to this:

Is this a normal occurance with these types of applications? Do they normally have these types of dependancy issues, because i even got them when trying to use the "stable" 9.2 RPM's.

If this is normal, so be it. If this is not normal, any advice as to how to remedy this problem.


Thanks for listening to me ramble.

~Jake