[expert] My 7.0 installation experience and a few questions

[Darin Martin]

I've run Mandrake since 6.0 and never had a problem with it.   Boy was I in for a shock when I installed 7.0   First, when I tried to make a boot disk with rawwritewin.exe or rawwrite.exe I received an error message that says LoadLibrary16 Failed when I try to get the program to write the image to disk. So, I used rawrite.exe from a command prompt to get the boot disk created..  The BIOS on my machine is too old to allow me to boot from CD   Next, The graphical installation is very smooth and easy to use.  I have a 10 gig WD drive that had Win98SE and Win2k installed on it under a single partition.  I re-sized the partition using Disk Drake down to 7900k to give me plenty of room for Mandrake 7.  The installation completed fine, and Mandrake boots great.  But, the data on my Fat32 partition is completely destroyed.  Some directories were completely empty.. One told me that I had 19gig of files in it (on a 10 gig drive). Good thing I keep a current Ghost image available for me to recover from.   So, I recover my main drive.  I have a 2 gig SCSI drive in this system also.. I move everything off of it on to my freshly restored 10gig drive and install Mandrake.  The install goes smoothly.  No problems at all. I get everything booted up and it detects my dual Pentium Pro processors and loads the SMP kernel, just like past versions of Mandrake had done.  KDE comes up, I'm able to set resolutions and color depth with no problems. Then, I go to set up my 28.8 external modem to dial up to my ISP.  KPPP looks the same as it has for some time now.  I enter the DNS settings, etc and tell KPPP to dial.  I get connected and logged into my ISP normally.. Thats were the trouble begins. I tried to open Konsole to try some traceroutes and pings.  For some reason, Konsole wont open.  I tried opening X-Chat to get on to IRC.. No go.. X-Chat also refuses to open. I can, however, open Netscape and use it with no problems.   As soon as I close KPPP, I can open as many Konsole and X-Chat copies as I want.  But, as long as I am connected to my ISP, there are very few programs that I can open.  This more than anything has me seriously confused.  I've tried fiddling with all the settings in KPPP and the one thing I found out is that if I dont set up any DNS or default gateways, applications will open fine.  As soon as I set those things up, very few applications will open.   If anyone has any ideas, I'm open to them.     A couple of constructive criticisms:   ! - Make it an option to choose runlevel 3 or runlevel 5 from the installer.  I prefer booting to the console and then deciding if I want to go into X or not.   2 - Disk Drake needs to be a little more robust with regard to resizing partitions.   If it were not for these few things, everything would be perfect.  I think the installer is great.  Its a major improvement over the redhat installer.  I hope you guys keep improving on it.   Darin -