As my Gentoo installation recently corrupted it seemed like a good excuse to try an 'easier' Linux distro but so far Mandrake has proven more problematic than Gentoo ever was.

I installed the distro from a magazine dvd coverdisc. first of all I can't get the documentation installed, I told it to install when I installed Mandrake but when I click the documentation button from the control centre it says it is't installed, do i want to install it? I put yes and get the error:
/usr/share/doc/mandrake/en/Starter.html/index.html cannot be displayed. No Help entry of this type

Next big problem, when I select the tool for installing programs I just get the busy cursor and it doesn't go away, I've waited 15 mins and nothing comes up.

Lastly is there a Mandrake equivalent to Gentoo's emerge command? I love just being able to type emerge prog and have it downlaod and install for me. The instructions that came with the disc make a vague reference to repositories but being a Newbie to Linux I have no idea what this means.

Thanks in advance for any help with these problems.

Try rebooting, the might be some segmentation faults. To confirm this you can try running this commmand in the terminal: rpmdrake --root

Without wanting to sound smug, I never had these problems when I installed Mandrake 10.
However, I had a DVD version and made CD iso images from the DVD as my PC cannot boot the DVD Drive (Can't be bothered to do anything about it).

To answer the missing documentation, Use the Mandrake Control Center to can install any missing packages from the disks. A notable omission from mandrake is stuff like KPP and KOffice by default. This doesn't help you if nothing's coming up when you go to this screen, though.

Perhaps this issue is because it's a DVD install, not a 3 CDs install? Perhaps the repositories aren't set up right?

A repository is a place (say a server on the Internet or a CD) where there are packages for your distribution of Linux.

To answer your emerge question. Mandrake has their own version, written in Perl I believe, and specific to Mandrake. urpmi

This does the same job as emerge, using rpms
First, go to:

http://urpmi.org/easyurpmi/index.php

Note that the servers are playing up at the moment. I can say that the French Mirrors seem to be fine.

Follow the instructions on that page.
You shoudl now have urpmi set up with repositories of packages from the Internet. It knows where to get rpms from.

Now when you want to install something type
"urpmi <packagename>" In a console.
Respond to any prompts and all shoudl be well.
Check the Graphical Install tool now. Are you still waiting 15 minutes for anything?

Hope this helps.

Thanks to you both. Typing rpmdrake --root seems to have got the installation program working. What would be the equivalent command for removing packages? That one also just gives me the busy sign.
With regard to the repositories, what are contrib, main, plf and updates? Do I need to have one of each?

One more niggle, my delete key seems to be acting as a backspace, can I change this? Sorry for all the newbish questions...

rpmdrake --root s the command in the menu, funny it doesn't work. The command to remove packages is rpmdrake-remove --root. I got both these commadns from the menu editor.

Oh yes, the problem with your keyboard maybe it's the keyboard layout. Mandrake control centre->hardware->keyboard. Try it in a different dekstop/window manager also.

With regard to what repositories are what:
main - The main set of packages that come with Mandrake.
contrib - Contributed packages for Mandrake. If its not listed on your CDs, chances are that they're here.
plf - There are certain packages that cannot be bundled with Mandrake for legal reasons, such as libdvdcss, which allows you to play DVDs correctly. This sort of stuff is here, plus other packages.
updates - packages that have been updated from the usual listed packages due to a bug, security vulnerability etc.

They are sectioned off to keep things a little more organised.

Using the Easy Urpmi tool mentioned above, you get commands to copy & paste into a terminal to set up each repository.

You don't have to have them all set up, you could simply use your supplied CDs and set up updates to keep your system up to date.

Including all repositories makes sure you have access to all the available software for Mandrake, though. Choice is yours.

I managed to get the documentation installed so that's some sort of progress

I'm having another problem though: when I try to use the update program I get an urpmi database locked error, after a bit of searching i found 2 suggested solutions: delete var/lib/urpmi/.LOCK and /var/lib/urpmi/.RPMLOCK neither of which I seem to have and reboot which doesn7t work. Any suggestions?

I usually get that problem if I half kill a process that was accessing the database. Open up ksysguard and look for any processes that might still be accessing it.

There does't seem to be anything using it, I'm getting the busy cursor in the update program too so maybe that's the problem.
The thing is obviously messd up, I'm going to try reinstalling from CDs instead of the DVD and see if that helps.
At least I was fortunate enough to install it on a second hard disk not my winXP one so I can still use Windows unlike some poor souls.

Did you check ksysguard? A restart should definitely fix it, if you can't find the offending process.

ok the database locked errordisappeared but now when i try to update i get the following error:

Unable to add medium, errors reported:

...retrieving failed: curl failed: exited with 9 or signal 0

retrieval of source hdlist (or synthesis) failed
no hdlist file found for medium "update_source"
problem reading synthesis file of medium "update_source"

I notice when I go to the easyurmpi site now there is no source listed for update which I thought there was before. Is this error related to that?

Anjin,
I also get the same response when I attempt to access the software repositories, so that may not be something wrong with your system.
Does anyone know what those errors mean when we try to update? (see above). I've tried to access almost all of the FTP repositories and get the same error every time, I've also looked on Mandrake's sites for any information and nothing is posted.
Thanks for any help!
J

No update repositories appear to be available for Mandrake 10.0

This could be because 10.0 is being shifted from "Community Edition" to "Official"

I would guess that the repositories are being geared up for Official and if so there are no updates or bug fixes yet for Official.

Hold off for a while, until 10.0 Official becomes available to the general public. I've no idea when this will be, a couple of weeks, I'm guessing.

In the meantime, I think that main, contrib & plf should work just fine if you want to install anything that isn't on your CDs.

I'd recommend updating your Internet repositories, just in case packages have been changed on the mirrors, you never know.

If ALL the repositories are broken right now, I doubt there's much we can do, but wait.

Yes, there are updates for 10 CE!
Go to Italy mirror and you will find them: it's only a matter of wandering about the dir tree, and you will find the /updates/10.0.
It's a small one: only 347 kb, but fixes a few major probs (I was affected by one!)

Regards,