When I made my first post in this thread, I did not read the entire post, just the last few messages - shame on me for not taking the time to thoroughly understand the issue . . .

There is one bit of information I missed before - The O.P., JesterMania installed Mandrake Linux 10. (S)He would be better served to migrate to the new Mandriva release when it is released in November. It will be labeled Mandriva Linux 2010.0. In 2005, Mandrake Linux merged with Conectiva Linux and became Mandriva Linux. If you have a recent computer with ample resources, KDE-4.x will give great beauty and reasonable performance. If you have a vintage system, choose the LXDE Desktop Environment because it is intended for use in limited resource environments.

Mandrake Linux 10.0 was released in the fall of 2009 and Mandrake Linux 10.1 was the transitional release, also known as Mandriva Linux 2005, and was released in Spring 2005. Both releases have been past their End of Life for quite some time. Their software packages are no longer being updated against new security threats. For this reason alone, it is imperative that you upgrade or update to a supported release version.

Another bit of advise I take exception with is the use of ANY cooker package in a production system. The cooker repositories are intended only for development and testing purposes. These packages are unstable and should not be used in a production system. You are probably not having any trouble now, because the Mandriva cooker repositories are frozen while the developers polish things up and get ready to publish the 2010 release next month. After that, development will resume, and the developers start working on the Spring release. New, unstable packages will replace what you see now, and if you install them, very bad things could start happening, from issues as light in severity as application crashes, to issues as severe as system or data corruption.

My best advise, resulting from more than ten years experience as a Mandriva Linux user, is to wait for the Mandriva Linux 2010.0 release, and install it.

Get rid of the cooker repositories so the only updates you see come from the stable repositories.

Set up three partitions for Linux:
A system (/) partition (mine is about 10GB)
A swap partition (2GB here)
A /home partition (make it as large as you can)

When you install the next Mandriva release, you can do an install rather than an update, and your user settings will be preserved on the /home partition while you will get a 'clean' install to the system partition.

The one caveat with this approach is that if you add packages after the initial installation, keep a list of them so you know which additional packages to install following installation of the next release.

I am an old timer, so I use a note book to keep a log of all my installation / update / upgrade activities. The one advantage of this is that if I suffer a HD crash, my log will not be destroyed.

HTH,

ernie, you might have read the whole thread but you forgot one important bit - the posting dates
The OP, and the replies to him/her, were posted in 2004 when Mandrake Linux 10 was of course the current release.

Sifter then revived the thread a couple of weeks ago, my reply to him should have (correct me if I'm wrong) setup all the normal distribution repositories the same as if you go to the Software Sources manager for the first time after a new install - I don't think anyone in the 2009 posts advised him to stay on cooker.

Thanks much, especially for your concern. I would not have installed a cooker package in any event. I need this 2009.1 installation to be stable, and I've had too many bad experiences with software in beta tests for cooker packages to be attractive on this installation.

I do appreciate the tips on dependencies. Sometimes, forensic work leads me in that direction.

As far as I'm concerned, this issue has been handily resolved.

Cheers!