Hi,
I have installed Mandrake 7.1 on a notebook (Pentium II 366, S3 Virge,
ESS Solo 1, PCMCIA Modem, and PCMCIA 100MB LAN). I have found/fixed some
bugs and I also have some suggestions:
1.) /etc/rc.d/rc.modules: BUG: In this file there is a typo. Instead of
initlog -s "Loading module: $modules"
it must read
initlog -s "Loading module: $module"
SUGGESTION: Leave out the 'insmod -p $module >/dev/null 2>&1 && '
checking, because it leads to problems in the following example. The
module 'paride' needs 'parport'. Therefore 'modprobe paride' loads
'parport' automatically. Starting 'paride' with 'insmod' would fail,
though with 'modprobe' it succeeds. Therefore the mentioned test fails
and 'paride' is not loaded. The simple 'modprobe' would load it. This
problem appears for all modules which require another module even if
'modprobe' would load it automatically.
2.) Netscape and PostScript or PDF files BUG: If I assign 'gv %s' (or
any other PostScript viewer) with the PostScript Mime Type under
'Edit'/'Preferences'/'Navigator'/'Applications', I always get a
GhostScript Interpreter Error and 'gv' shows me
the correct number of pages but not the contents of the file. Assigning
'acroread %s' (Both version 3 and 4) to the 'Portable Document Format'
Mime type leads to the PDF file being loaded, but not shown. 'acroread'
does not start.
To fix this Bug I have edited /usr/bin/netscape commenting out the
following lines
if [ -n "$LD_PRELOAD" ]; then
LD_PRELOAD=$prefix/lib/netscape/libnspipepatch.so:$LD_PRELOAD
else
LD_PRELOAD=$prefix/lib/netscape/libnspipepatch.so
fi
export LD_PRELOAD
both in the newbrowser() and in the oldopt() function. Now Netscape
displays PostScript and PDF (via 'gv' and 'acroread') without any
problems.
3.) The Acrobat Reader Plugin for Netscape does not work in general BUG:
I have added the lines
export MOZILLA_HOME=/usr/lib/netscape # find plugins
export
NPX_PLUGIN_PATH=/usr/local/Acrobat3/Browsers/intellinux:$MOZILLA_HOME/p\lugins:$HOME/.netscape/plugins
# find
# Acrobat Reader plugin
to the beginning of the /usr/bin/netscape script and Netscape found the
plugin, but ignored it due to a missing libc5 library. The library is
/usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib/libc.so.5 and its path is in /etc/ld.so.conf.
So I set the link
ln -s /usr/i486-linux-libc5/lib/libc.so.5 /lib
ldconfig
and Netscape crashed with the plugin. After commenting out the lines
which I inserted in /usr/bin/netscape. Netscape ran, but without
Acroread plugin.
4. ) Turning off NIS when there is no network SUGGESTION: Sometimes I
connect my notebook to a LAN where it gets some information by NIS, but
sometimes I use it without LAN. Then the ypbind daemon starts anyway and
I get a lot of messages because of a missing NIS server. To avoid these
error messages I have inserted a check in the /etc/rc.d/init.d/ypbind
file. I have edited only one line as follows:
...
# See how we were called.
case "$1" in
start)
echo -n "Binding to the NIS domain... "
daemon ypbind
echo
# the following fixes problems with the init scripts continuing
# even when we are really not bound yet to a server, and then
things
# that need NIS fail.
pid=`pidofproc ypbind`
if [ -n "$pid" ]; then
echo -n "Listening for an NIS domain server: "
times=0
until ypwhich > /dev/null 2>&1 || [ "$times" = "10" ]
do
echo -n "." ;
sleep 1
times=$[$times+1]
done
###
### This line changed:
###
ypwhich || $0 stop ## <-- Turns off NIS if ypwhich fails
###
###
fi
RETVAL=$?
[ $RETVAL -eq 0 ] && touch /var/lock/subsys/ypbind
;;
...
See the line between the '###' lines. Now the NIS daemon will only run
if there is a NIS server available.
5.) Suggestion: Take PCMCIA network cards into account during the
network configuration in the installation process.
I hope these hints will make Mandrake better, but all in all it is a
nice distribution (automatic GL installation, automatically use ALSA for
ESS SOLO 1 which is much better than the kernel driver for this card,
syntax highlighting in Emacs ...).
Till
