CSG Mandrake 10.2

Department of Computing	Imperial College London
Notes on the new Linux, Mandrake 10.2

Linux Mandrake 10.2 is installed in the Labs, and on all new workstations in DoC from October 2005.

This page outlines some changes from the previous version.

The kernel is 2.6.16 and should be very stable.
Gnome/KDE: if you use these window managers your old settings may not work. If so move all .gnome*, .gconf* dirs/files to an "old" directory for Gnome or .kde*, .dcop*,.qt*, .mcop* for KDE.
Email: usual clients ie pine, mozilla, mozilla-thunderbird and sylpheed are all available. Sylpheed is a major new version so you'll need to create new settings - follow the prompts.
Note that the thunderbird command is mozilla-thunderbird. From time to time, we install the very bleeding edge latest version of thunderbird as:
```
/vol/linux/mandrake/10.2/x86/apps/thunderbird/latest/thunderbird
```
The new version of Pine stores copies of messages you send in a file called 'Sent' whereas the old version uses a default filename of 'sent-mail'. To ensure that all your sent mail is stored in the same file while old systems are still running, add Sent to the following section in your .pinerc file:
```
# Over-rides default path for sent-mail folder, e.g. =old-mail (using first
# folder collection dir) or ={host2}sent-mail or ="" (to suppress saving).
# Default: sent-mail (Unix) or SENTMAIL.MTX (PC) in default folder collection.
default-fcc=Sent
```
This change can also be made from Setup/Config while running Pine.
Web browsers: mozilla-firefox is new, as with thunderbird note that the command really is mozilla-firefox not just firefox. We may from time to time install the very latest, bleeding edge, version is:
```
/vol/linux/mandrake/10.2/x86/apps/firefox/latest/firefox
```
CD/DVD writing: should work. Best to use "k3b" as the GUI - it auto detects the drive correctly and makes burning easy.
CDroms, USB devices, floppy disks and zip: we are no longer putting entries in /etc/fstab for these, so mount /media/floppy will not work.
The new procedure for floppy disks is:
```
pmount /dev/media/floppy0
ls /media/media_floppy0
pumount /media/media_floppy0
```
and for CDs:
```
pmount /dev/media/cdrom0
ls /media/media_cdrom0
pumount /media/media_cdrom0
```
Always look under /dev/media which is where all removable media devices will be added. USB sticks should appear in /dev/media dynamically, usually as something like /dev/media/usbdisk0_part1, and similarly SD cards should appear as something like /dev/media/sddisk0_part1.
Sound: does not work on some of the Shuttles. These machines were a compromise choice, in that every other part of the system matched our requirements exactly but we had to sacrifice known good audio chips. We took a chance with the sound in the hope that it will be working later on. The Linux driver has some of the audio channels missing from the user-space controls.
Eclipse: initially there were two versions of Eclipse, however we've now got Eclipse 3.2 installed everywhere, just type eclipse.

Please mail us to report any problems, or if you have any queries.