[Glastonbury] Linux's latest...

[tim hall]

Hi Nick,

On Monday 26 April 2004 3:04 am, Nick Irwin wrote:
> I installed Mandrake 10.0 today and took a plunge in the deep end with the
> 2.6 Kernel! I'm also onto KDE 3.2 and ALSA sound among other things.

Brave person! I'm not sure I'm ready to take the leap yet - I'm not quite sure 
how the 2.6 kernels perform with regards to low-latency &/ how you would go 
about patching them. So my next upgrade is to 2.4.24, of which I can get a 
pre-patched version.

> First things first, Kernel 2.6..... well being an average Joe of a user, it
> doesn't really make much difference to me, but I'm so glad that my
> CD-writer no longer has to be emulated as a SCSI drive, load up times seem
> faster in places and thats about it. Oh and I managed to confuse KDE to the
> point where it couldn't tell me what Kernel I was using - had to re-install
> to solve that little gem.

Now I'm confused, I was led to understand that CD burners had to be emulated 
as scsi drives because they /are/ in effect scsi drives. I guess if it works 
and you don't have to write kludges, then, who cares?-)

> KDE 3.2 is as you would expect, not much different, however it has a few
> new touches which I quite like such as the ability to choose from a
> selection of splash screens (sorry but I really do like that feature).

I like eye-candy too, don't apologise to me! - despite using CLIs a lot of the 
time (or maybe because of that :-)

> The sound has gone very weird, I dunno if this is a 2.6, ALSA or MDK 10.0
> problem but I can listen to CD's etc but I keep getting aRTS errors and no
> system sounds will play.... ho hum.

You need to disable aRTS, it conflicts with ALSA. It's a feature ;-)

> Another niggle is that now whenever I use the scroll wheel on my mouse it
> affects the bottom scroll bar not the side one...... how this ended up
> being the case I may never know, maybe someone thought it was a good
> default.

No, that doesn't sound right. What does XF86Config-4* say in the mouse 
stanzas? (* or whatever it is under mdk10)

> MDK10 also comes with Kontact (although I thought the name was supposed to
> be Kroupware but nevermind) instead of KMail. What are peoples views on
> this rather Outlook style mail client? It seems a little bulky to me, I
> preferred the streamlined KMail myself.

TBH I've heard & experienced little either way.

cheers

tim hall