After a painless boot, I was presented with the stunning mandriva desktop, got into the control center (now that's what I call professional polish) and tried to set-up my wireless card.

My ralink was easily recognized, the wizard offers to connect to my network (the wizard smartly scanned the neighbourhood), I enter my wep key and then the unbelievable happens : Cannot install the dhcp-client package ! Wot ! How can this happen ? DHCP is not on the disk ?

I really thought I was going to do the hard drive install over my failed attempt at opensuse 10.3 (from 10.2 which worked fine but lacked something) now I am back in XP and hope there is a simple answer to this question because mandriva 2008 looks like it might cancel my decision of buying a Mac or worse, revert to XP.

I've tried kubuntu and it might have huge merits but it's ugly.... Sorry kubuntu fans.

Thanks for reading that far. Any idea ?

Well,why just you don't try wired network.Set your rpm sources from easyurpmi.zarb.org or anywhere else,install whatever you need and try again.Finally you will have wireless network.You can leave you wifi router working,so you can test the connection(I guess you now that for sure,I am just saying it if somebody ask in future).

Thanks for your reply

My ethernet card is fried so ethernet is no option right now.

I am going to have the same problem with a wired connection, DHCP is how the PC get it's address and routing info + DNS...

Makes me think that I can try manually assigning an address and default gatewar to the card ... should work if the dhcp-client is the only missing thing.

Still can't believe that dhcp would have been left out and lots of people would have had that problem no ? Anyone with a trouble free connection to a DHCP based router ?

I didn't expirience that problem.My router is DHCP based too.Mandriva 2008 successfully changed its address(by my mistake though).I believe you can set your settings manually,set you repos and install the package.Hope this will work.

And did you use the ONE cd or the DVD ?

I had a play with the CD version the other day on an old IBM laptop with a DLINK 650 (can't recall if it is 650+ or 650), and DHCP to set IP, etc. Worked fine for me - same process - found card, entered passphrase, etc,etc

Right, so it might have been a fluke. Will try again tonight... Wish me luck

I am using the DVD.I downloaded it from the mirrors(didn't remember which one exactly) because the torrent file give me mistake.

I can't believe this is happening. Not only can't I set-up the networking whereas the driver seems to work fine but when I try to start the live install module, it doesn't start. Tried a few time to no avail.

I can't believe this has been tested....

Off topic but just retried kubuntu and after a struggle to get the screen to a readeable state, it's to find that they, like opensuse, use the broken (for me at least) rt2500pci driver. Looks like it's the end of the Linux road for me after so many years, I haven't got the patience anymore

I don't know what you are using but I just checked the contents of the x86_64 dvd and the dhcp-client is really there, more than one version, in fact. Did you use Add/Remove Software to install it? It uses the dvd by default.

I used the Mandriva ONE CD because I've had trouble burning DVD ISOs recently. And when I go on Mandriva's website, I only get that choice, other than the powerpack.

I got mine here (free):

ftp://ftp.heanet.ie/pub/mandrake/Man...ial/iso/2008.0

I used this one:
http://www.mandriva.com/en/download.html.It have instructions and offering choice between Mandriva One and Mandriva 2008.Check it out.