I have this shiny new HP media PC to play with (well, setup really) and I installed Mandriva 2006/x86_64 on it last night and was somewhat disappointed with how it turned out. The big issue was with the proprietary ATI drivers which, to my amazement, weren’t in commercial Club repositories. This is a fairly significant problem because our upgraded xorg-x11 requires these new drivers (I discovered this after —auto-selecting from the updates medium and X stopped working). This morning I find there are no new drivers in Club. Ouch.
So wandering over to ATI’s download page found me the latest drivers in a nice installer form. Download the ATI Driver Installer and go to town… it actually works quite well. With it, you can create Mandriva rpms by following the little dialogs that seem to be 100% compatible (I installed the powerpack DVD so it had the old proprietary drivers and using this, the packages were made and I could just “rpm -Fvh” the resulting rpm packages). Yes! X works again.
Had a heck of a time setting up my urpmi sources last night tho… looks like mDNSResponder is being stupid… ftp was complaining about no buffer space being left, but lynx worked (anything using FTP, btw… so that was the ftp client and curl). Disabling mDNSResponder allowed me to get my urpmi sources setup. Strange… I don’t recall seeing this before but this was one of the few times I didn’t really fiddle with the install and disable a bunch of stuff.
The other issue is a long-standing one with 2006/x86_64 community and some broken KDE/QT packages. This has been a problem for months, I’ve reported it on numerous occassions (because I’ve seen it on my x86_64 laptop) and it still isn’t fixed.The problem is as follows:
[root@media ~]# urpmi --media community --auto-select Some package requested cannot be installed: foomatic-db-3.0.2-1.20060227.0.1.20060mdk.noarch Continue? (Y/n) The following packages have to be removed for others to be upgraded: libarts1-1.4.2-2mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3) libkdecore4-3.4.2-31.3.20060mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3, due to unsatisfied libqt3 >= 3.2.2, due to missing libartsflow.so.1, due to missing libartsflow_idl.so.1, due to missing libkmedia2_idl.so.1, due to missing libmcop.so.1, due to missing libqtmcop.so.1, due to missing libsoundserver_idl.so.1) libqt3-3.3.4-23mdk.i586 (due to unsatisfied qt3-common == 3.3.4-23mdk) mindawn-1.3.050824-050916mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3) skype-1.2.0.17-1mdk.i586 (due to missing libqt-mt.so.3) x86-compat-galaxy-kde-1.0.2-19mdk.x86_64 (due to missing libkdefx.so.4) (y/N)
Umm… this sucks and is a major nuisance because it gets in the way of everything else in community from getting upgraded other than urpmi and glibc. Of course, I don’t need any of this, but the fellow who’s picking up this computer might (I’m sure he might like to play with skype).
Of course, this is all KDE/QT-related stuff which strengthens my notion that KDE sucks. Oh, and that x86_64 is a second-rate citizen. Has no one else seen this? If I elect to remove those packages (hit “y” instead of “n”), I get a whole whack of packages to update.
Note that this is a default 2006/x86_64 powerpack DVD install. I removed a few thinks, like kdegraphics-kprintfax or whatever, stuff like kopete I removed, but for the most part I left things well enough alone and this is the thanks I get. Bad community repository.
Oh well, I guess he doesn’t get to play with skype after all… I can’t leave the machine in a half-baked state so off we go.