drmanjoor: Which version of MEPIS were you using? I use 3.43 but 6.0 is available.

I do apologize for my forgetfulness. I use simplyMepis 6.

Thanks

I noticed you have a Toshiba laptop. I've heard others complain that Toshiba laptops are not very Linux friendly, though I confess I have no experience with Toshiba laptops myself.

I guess I have Packard Bell Easy note laptop. Toshiba is make of my HDD. Anyway I did not have any major issues so far on my laptop except for my PCMCIA not working. I am doing some search on the internet to rectify that. One possibility is blacklisting BCM43xx driver. I am not sure whether it is due to that or ndiswrapper. Because command 'ndiswrapper -l' also shows the presence of the driver. Anyway I am going through all the forums to see for possibilities. I would appreciate if you know about this in any way. And this thread is not for requests, so I will stick for what it is.

In Kubuntu I had problems with torrents. Mepis is doing fine with that. Ktorrent is working alright. Other issues I had with Kubuntu is disconnecting from yahoo server on gaim. I guess that is not happening in mepis. When I tried to add repositories in mepis through gui, it told me there are some errors in source.list. Hence I was unable to add new repository. When I restarted the laptop the error was somehow rectified. When I reloaded the synaptic manager it did not give me any error and it had updated with the new repository. I have not tried adding external repository which I will be trying soon. In ubuntu wallpaper tray utility is useless. It has to be configured manually through command line. Here KDE utility is the best for that. So far mepis is going strong on my laptop without any crashes.

Finally I had some real annoyment with mepis (as if I am searching for one). Anyway the 'shutdown' command program was not functioning and it freezed the laptop when I shutdown the laptop using gui. When I restarted it, login manager was not allowing me to login to my user account. It was allowing to login as a root. But the message was coming the computer was going to shutdown at such and such time when I tried to login as a user and root. I tried to cancel the shutdown program using the command 'shutdown -c', however the terminal gave me the message no pid was found. Anyway finally I restarted the computer and then it was alright. I have not tried shutdown command again. Should I?

How old is your laptop? That could be important.

I ask because older laptops sometimes have more Linux problems than newer laptops. "Old" and "new" are relative terms, but I would say a laptop within the last 12 months would be "new."

However, if you are using MEPIS 6.0 or higher, it should have a very recent kernel. The 2.6.15 kernels and higher are, supposedly, better at laptops than older kernels.

I am certainly no expert, but as long as your important data is backed-up on a separate hdd or CD-R, DVD+-R, etc, then I would say: go ahead and try the restart / shutdown command again.

If you do so, then let us know what happens. I'd be interested to find out what happens.

hi drmanjoor --

About your pcmcia card, have you read the MEPIS Wiki?

http://www.mepis.org/docs/en/index.p...m_43xx_chipset

Lots of good stuff there for MEPIS noobies...

Good luck.

I was very happy using SimplyMepis on my old Toshiba Tecra.
Very old hardware, no upgrades, all original. It was slow, it sometimes crashed, but it worked!
It worked good!

But that was last year. Now, I'm a supercool user of Suse 10.1
on my brand new Fujitsu Siemens Amilo Pro. WOW. Just had to tell. Got it yesterday!!

I have retried the 'shutdown' command and this time it worked alright. It did not crash anything. That is the good news.

Try it a few more times and let us know what happens.

I have tried 'shutdown' few more times. I found the following particular command was causing the problem. I am not sure whether the syntax is correct or not

Anyway I am not going to try that anymore. There might be some easier way.

drmanjoor

Atlast I have sorted out my 'wireless' issues. I was really annoyed when my wireless stopped working after the automatic update of simplymepis 6. I thought it might be due to the update of linux image. I tried to find out various possibilities of sorting out. The most common advice I found out was blacklisting 'bcm43xx' or blaclisting 'ndiswrapper'. As per the recommendations I tried both in '/etc/modeprobe.d/blacklist'. I was frustrated to find out that both of them did not work. I tried several other methods like fwcutter, which were unsuccessful. Finally I thought of reinstalling mepis on the laptop from start. When I reinstalled it I got back my wireless working. However but to my dismay it stopped working after the automatic update of upgradable packages. Fortunately I was carefully looking into the terminal view what was going on during the update. I found out that during the update mepis was also updating my modeprobe.conf with new one it the same directory. I seeked that out and found out it also had listings for blacklisting. The 'bcm43xx' was blacklisted in that file by default. I always had problem with ndiswrapper and my wireless in the past. The ndiswrapper was not recognizing my hardware for some reason. It was suppose to give a message that hardware present when installed. In my laptop ndiswrapper installed the driver normally but did not give the message hardrive present. Now I blacklisted 'ndiswrapper' instead of 'bcm43xx' in /etc/modeprobe.d/modeprobe.conf and restarted the laptop. Wow my wireless sprang back to life.(If anybody needs detailed Howto on this issue, please let me know)

Now I have a new minor issue. I understand my linux image was updated to 2.15-27-386 but the grub is still loading to the earlier version 2.15-26-386. It is not causing any functional problems for me. But still I dont understand that. During my first install xorg started without any issues after nvidia driver installation. During my second install of mepis the nvidia driver installation caused some trouble xorg.conf which required repair using the cd as recommended in the website. I guess all these issues are a bit annoying and bewildering for a new comer who expects everything to work out of the box. Anyway it was a very good learning experience and I am at the moment sticking with mepis. And I am going to experiment with synaptic touchpad now. I had some issues with other distributions. In ubuntu the cursor was jumping around when using openoffice which was too annoying for me. I tried changing the sensitivity of the touchpad to '0'. However I was unable to find the options for that in the configuration file. I understand there is a very good graphic utility to rectify that in mepis. Let me try that and will give my experience about that next.

That's good news on the wireless--congratulations on sticking with it! Although we wrote the Wiki section (following an original Ubuntu forum post) to recommend blacklisting the native driver, it may well be that blacklisting ndiswrapper will work just as well, or even better in some situations. Their competition is obviously the problem. I am going to test your solution on my system to see what happens...

I don't know if this is the same issue I had or not, but after updating the NVIDIA drivers I found out that I can only use the 8762 NVIDIA drivers that are on the DVD and I can't upgrade to the 8776 version that is in the repos now. When I used 8776 I couldn't get X to boot up no matter how much I messed with xorg.conf. So, you might try going back to 8762.

I guess you are right. I am now downloading the dvd. I am spending more time on making my laptop work than I am working on it. I think lack of standards between distributions is a real issue which needs to be sorted out. If a newbie is to browse and research through all forums to make his computer work just because he updated his operating system is really nerve wrecking. I am a bit disappointed. I dont mind researching a little bit and doing a bit here ant there. But I cant go on and go on with tinkering. I am too busy to go on and go on researching IT stuff. Anyway let us see.