Mandrake has gone all borked :/

Baz_

hey all,

I booted up linux tonight for the first time since I got broadband in *Yipee*. It didnt recognise the correct ethernet connection at first, but eventually (with the use of a nice mandrake wizard) it connected and all was rosy. Now while I was there and had the internet, and had ink for me printer I decided to install the printer drivers, again all seemed rosy. I then went into rpmdrake to update some stuff, may as well while im online, I thought. As many of you might know rpmdrake is a nasty piece of ****, and probably the worst thing about mandrake, so I faffed around for a few minutes to see if I could find the package I wanted to upgrade (Quanta plus to be specific, saw a promising article in this months linux format magazine). I couldnt find it anywhere so I exited rpmdrake. Now from the time I started drakeconf to get me internet up, to the time I exited rpmdrake, I didnt notice anything wrong. When I went to the kde start menu thing (what is that called btw, f*cking windows terminology) I was cut down to about a quarter of the options that I had before I started, and worst of all only two of the games I normally use were left :eek: (jk). Now I know that you can invoke all the apps from the command line, but I did like the start menu thing, so I'm a bit lost without it.

Another symptom is that it linux used to open directories with konqueror, but now when I try to open directories it asks me to choose the application I want to use, that is far from ideal behaviour tbh. Now a conincidence is that my Start->Networkin->WWW section of the start menu thing is gone completely which is the section in which konqueror normally resides, so I'm wondering (and guessing that they are) if these two things are linked.

I'm pretty much at a loss as to what to do next, I've troubleshot as much as my limited linux skills will let me and got no further than square one, and now I need a real beard to come to my rescue.

/me screams shrilly "help me please!"

Thanks in advance for any replies.

Baz_

pickarooney

I had this same problem for about a year. I fixed it last week and have since forgotten how I did it. I wa positive I opened kmenuedit and clicked on a button to restore default configuration, but there's no such button. If I find it again I'll post it.

parasite

have a lash off 'menudrake', i.e. force it to update the menu entries
terribly fiddly & buggy in my experience

Fenster

I beat my head against the wall over that program when I tried Mandrake. Same with YaST in SuSE, now that I think of it. Great programs and all, but they can't manage packages for crap.

You'd save yourself a world of hassle by just installing apt and Synaptic and then sticking some worthwhile repositories (Fedora ones seem to have gone to crap recently) in your sources.list. Voila

Baz_

yes indeed, menudrake did cure what ailed me, just opened her up, clicked on save configuration (it displayed as normal in there you see) and bobs your uncle fannys your aunt, bish bash bosh, its back as normal, luvly jubbly. Only thing is though I was planning on reinstalling it to get more partitions on me hard drive, so I'm not sure if I should have bothered, still nice to know /me urges beard to grow.

ta parasite (never thought I'd thank a parasite)

Baz_

corvideon

Hi guys

I used mandrake for several years and just got a little tired of the various buggy config tools / rpm dependency problems. It's a great distro in many respects but I have found Libranet 2.8.1 (www.libranet.com) to be the best distro for me. The current version is free (though normally you have to pay for it). The software is a bit older but completely stable. And because it's debian based you get apt...no more rpms!

The guys in the forums (forum.libranet.com) are a great help too.

Give it a whizz...
:cool:

pickarooney

is apt-get really reliable (it's available for mandrake but I havn't bother installing it yet). Does it compile the apps after downloading them or are they pre-compiled?

Ant

I've used apt-get on a Debian system that I have shell access to and in my experience so far, it works wonderfully. It installs the pre-compiled .deb files and then presents you with configuration options for the new package. I can't say if it would do this with RPMs on an rpm-based system.

I'm using Mandrake 9.2 as my home desktop system at the moment. I usually just type the program / command name in an xterm to run the program from there rather than navigate through the menu system. Though I don't use it that often, I like the Mandrake GUI and find it fairly intuitive. The main reason I'm using it at the moment is so that other family members can also use the PC.

So far, I've had no problems installing and upgrading packages using Mandrake's equivalent of apt-get: the urpmi command.