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NOTE: To view screenshots of the issues discussed in this article, please check here: 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10.

My last article was written shortly after I'd spent a day and a half pulling my hair out trying to get Mandrake to work satisfactorily, it was written undeniably in the heat of the moment and right on the cusp of me removing Mandrake's EXT2 partition and never touching any form of Linux again. However against my better judgment I decided to leave it installed - after all I'm determined that this will NOT beat me. (I actually did nuke the partition and reinstall it)

Hardware Configuration

I find this the single hardest thing to track down and fix. As I mentioned in the last article. I was disappointed that Mandrake didn't want to let me use my USB ISDN Adapter. It seems to correctly identify it in USBView but there is no means to select it in the Mandrake internet config program, using either basic or expert options.

I'm sure there is a config file somewhere I could edit but a few problems arise from that theory.
1 - I don't know where that config file might be or what it's called
2 - I wouldn't know what to edit or what to change anything to
3 - I have no idea how to identify the usb port it's connected to (In windows this is USB port 3)

I also couldn't get Bluetooth working with Mandrake - so no Personal Network and no syncing with my phone- even if I knew how to do that in Linux. But one of the comments I received after the last article was from someone who claimed that it was supported in Mandrake 9.1. as he'd personally put it in there. Apparently the module is called Bluez. So I looked, and I looked and I looked but nothing comes up anywhere when I do a search for "Bluez". But running "lsmod" shows a module called bluez as present (incidentally why can I only lsmod as root?)

But I can't find any documentation on my computer about Bluez, nor anything on the mandrake site, nor indeed anything anywhere that tells me how to use or configure it. So it's just sitting there on the computer, maybe doing something maybe not, I can't tell. With he best will in the world, how on earth am I (or anyone else) going to know that Bluez is the Bluetooth module? If it was called bluetooth (or contained the word bluetooth in it somewhere) it would be easy to hazard a guess as to it's function, but the only way to know what Bluez is/does it by someone telling you! Surely there has to be a better way than that?

As someone else pointed out, perhaps I should have visited the Mandrake site PRIOR to installing it and finding out if my hardware was supported. A very good point I thought, so, belatedly I did return to the Mandrake site to check their hardware compatability list. It err... doesn't seem to work very well, or was it just me? Typing in "Eicon" (for my USB Terminal Adapter)... nothing comes back.. Type in USB ISDN nothing comes back.... Type in Webcam Go, nothing comes back... finally in sheer desperation I enter "ISDN" to which I get about 6 entries back all with showing the "not compatible with Mandrake" icon. Not a good sign. Tried typing in Bluetooth.... nothing... Bluez, nothing. Maybe I just went on a day it was down or not working properly, but even a couple of days later was still not getting anything back. Surely Mandrake have tested their OS with lots of hardware, but perhaps not my specific bits, but surely other Mandrake users have tried them.. Looking through the newsgroups and archive there are loads of people using a similar kit as me and running Mandrake (and having similar problems). Ok, next stop: the Eicon site.. Oh dear, the USB TA is not shown to be supported by Linux. Not good news, but I know that it DOES work, as I had it working correctly in Suse 8.0. Can't actually remember how I configured it though, other than to use the Hisax driver and connect via USB... Suse seemed to do the rest!

Next up, my graphics card (Matrox G550). Seemingly, something is wrong somewhere as whenever I try to run any OpenGL thing, the computer locks up completely. Tried with Unreal Tournament, several OpenGL games and some XMMS visualations--all do the same. So I pop over to the Matrox site and download their latest Linux drivers and their latest incarnation of Powerdesk, their graphics card tweaking utility. Apparently, it will allow me to stretch my screen (good) as well as adjust the screen resolution easily and refresh rate (excellent). Download the tgz files, extract them, examine and digest the install instructions, seems easy enough. So, I open up a terminal and run the install.sh file as instructed. But oh dear, once again I'm thwarted in my attempts to get anything working.

Apparently the latest drivers aren't compatible with this latest version of Xfree86. (Luckily I know what Xfree86 is). But the drivers are dated last month, so in my mind, that means they're fairly new. So why are they incompatible? Perhaps these drivers are already installed - it's definitely using some kind of Matrox driver! So I decide to skip that and try and install the Powerdesk tools by double clicking the rpm and going through the installer process. It works. Fantastic, my first proper install of any application ever. (Well, it doesn't throw up any errors!) But there's a problem. I don't know where the program has been installed or what it's called. How on earth do I find out? After lots of searching for possible names I take a guess that it's called the same as the rpm, and it is. I su into the shell (as it asks me to do) and run it again. Click Ok to continue at the pop up window and "poof", it logs out of KDE and returns me to the log in screen (I'm guessing X restarts as the screen blanks for a long time). Try as I might it won't do anything else but this every time. Bummer! but not to worry I just have to remember not to run anything OpenGL and I can live with it not working 100% for now.

1. "Linux Giving Grief, Part 1"
2. "Linux Giving Grief, Part 2"
3. "Linux Giving Grief, Part 3"