G'day,

imm having some troubles settling into the mandrake environment after a year with Fedora. i was wondering if anyone could tell me how i can put the multiple desktop windows on the taskbar ? i have 4 desktops so there should be 4 of them small windows on the taskbar but mandrake doesnt seem to be showing them. any ideas ?

Right click on a clear bit of taskbar to get menu. Choose

Add to Panel -> Applet -> Desktop Previewer and Pager

(may be called something else in mandrake 10 - I'm using 2006 now, but the procedure is much the same)

Ok, i will try that. Next question :

wehenever i start up mandrake, it starts up in shell. i have to log in, become su and then do "init 5" in order to start the GUI. any ideas how i can tell it to make the gui the default at startup.

thanx

The "easy" way, once you are up in the GUI, is to start the Mandrake Control Center" (Star --> System --> Configuration --> Configure your computer). Select the "Boot" tab, and look at the options available there. One of them should have the checkbox to click to boot directly to the GUI for you. (I'm sitting at work in front of a Windows box right now, so I can't check which specific tab/button has it.)

Okay, I'm home now, and in Mandriva 2006 (and 2005 before it) probably similar to 10.0, it is on the "Boot" tab, in the section to "Enable auto-login". You can boot straight to the GUI whether or not you use the autologin feature.

thanks a lot mate, i had by mistake checked that actually. its intresting, Mandrake is quiet confusing because there are sooooo many menus and sub-menus in the start button unlike fedora where everything is sorted into 2 simple menus.

right now i am attempting to get firefox installed ( i had firefox on fedora, its the default browser there but mandrake doesnt come with it and all my bookmarks and stuff are saved and i would like o use them ) but am not sure how to proceed. i tried some tutorials but when i try the command from terminal after installation i get :

firefox: error while loading shared libraries: libmozjs.so: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory


i would be grateful for any suggestions.

ohh BTW amosf, i cant find the button you are talking about. there simply aint no "Desktop Previewer and Pager" button or anything that sounds remotely like that.

Well it exists on all the distros here... I'll check exactly what it's called on mandrake 10 later... Maybe you left some things out of the installation...

Just curious, what sort of things /do/ you see in the add to panel -> applet menu...

My other thought is, why are you going with Mandrake 10? Mdk10.0 came out about two years ago. The current version is Mandriva 2006. (And it includes Firefox a the default web browser, too.) Just asking, as you may have a very good reason to stick with 10.

hmm, dint know it was that old. i just wanted to try out something other than fedora and from my superficial research i thought Mdk10.1 was the latest. but now that i realize the 2006 is the latest, i might as well download that. lets see how it goes..............

I think it's called "KPager" or something like that.

well, i dont know where to start. after almost 12 hrs of 10 continous re-installations and a lot ofhair ripping i got no where with the mandriva 2006 installation !!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

for starters it gave me a lot of truble with my video card. the program refused to auto detect a suitable driver after the installation. i have a GeForce 6600 GT and all the geforce options i selected would crash the installer whenever i tried to run a test. as a result i would have to repeat most of the installation process again to arrive at this point once again. i then used what FC4 and Mandrake 10.1 used to use, namely the VESA drivers. now as if this problem wasnt bad enough, the computer began to throw all sorts of problems at me. it always logged me into shell and sometimes "startx" would log me into KDE and sometimes it would not. on top of that, after i installed my nvidia drivers mandriva the bootloader got screwed p and mandriva refused to boot up.

overall its been a really screwed up process and for now i am going back to good old fedora. i seriously dont understand though, i though mandrake was an older and more mature version of linux and even though i am a sort of beginner, why the heck does it have to be so messed up ??

I'll be honest, I don't understand why Mandriva is giving you this kind of problem. I have installed Mandrake/Mandriva on all sorts of systems, starting years ago with Mandrake 6, and I have never had this kind of trouble. It always installs error-free for me. (RedHat/Fedora has always given me fits, though.)

Same here...