I installed fresh Mandriva 2010.0 on my HP Pavillion DV 7 Laptop and later found that most of my DVDs — old or new — just won’t play. Xine complains that they may be “crypted”, yet other DVDs play, regardless of the region. I put the same DVDs in my older laptop and they ALL play fine. In my conspiracy-theory mind, iI think this may be because Mandriva is assisting (or whatever) Fluendo sell “ability to play DVDs”. I partly suspect the new-fangled DVD burner/player hardware to be at fault, but i would imagine that the positive reviews of the hardware would mean enough people would buy it and raise the issue with Mandriva or their distro vendor.

I don’t think i’m missing drivers is the problem. I installed all the drivers i’ve ever had to find and install the same way or pretty much the same way as at least the previous 3 or 4 years. Now, it’s as if Mandriva is deliberate just ignoring the dependencies. I realize it’s the Free version, and IIRC, the PowerPack version includes Fluendo. But, for now, I don’t want to get the PowerPack because every download costs me hundreds of MB against my monthly 5 GB download via my wireless ISP. So, when i botch or want to tweek an install, i can wipe my monthly 5GB limit in about 3 installs. Doing this one time cost me $100 extra on my cell bill and i was enraged enough to vow to never hit too close again. Also, i one time (IIRC, late 2008 or early 2009) purchased PowerPack, had the install fail, and probably because i waited too long (weeks) to get around to trying again, i no longer could access the binary and never got a complete transfer. Yet, despite my one or two emails to Mandriva, i never heard from them. SO, i vowed to not pay until they redress this sore point without my having to prompt them. They KNOW when people access restricte, paid-for content, and they should know when a complete image worth of data or transfer-success event has happened. If a failed or too-short a download time happens, they should rememdy it and keep contacting the paying customer until the client says “success” or “successed”.

Going to various repos didn’t help either. I’m not enthusiastic about breaking the install to much more as most things work, even audio in Altec Lansing hardware in the laptop. But, what is infuriating is that the new sound server is insane when crossfade is used. Audio also comes out of the speakers even when the headphone/speaker jack is plugged in, so i have to go int Kmix to lower but not mute the line channel. If crossfade is enabled, the stupid thing keeps resetting the audio level to medium to high. Depending on other settings, this level can blast quite high. It embarrassed me quite intensely when one day i was sitting in Borders with my rubbery earbuds in. So, i was tooling along, listining to crisp, sharp Korean pop music, and a Japanese guy gets taken in hand by the cafe’s manager for playing his music aloud. After about a half minute, i decided to find out whether i was the problem. After removing an earbud, i heard my laptop blasting away, because of a so-called feature decided upon by HP and Altec Lansing, a feature that is not a PITA under win7, but under Linux is an extreme nuisance. It didn’t help that Mandriva had no cause or didn’t see fit to check for hardware that could play out of 2 headphone jacks and one line out to see if embarrassments might follow. Good thing it was only MUSIC streaming out of my speakers as i sat blissfully listening through earbuds. I STILL fell twitches of embarrassment, and that was over 2 months ago.

Another thing that maddens me is that KDE 4 under Mandriva STILL forgets which virtual desktops hold which activities. I haven’t figured out how to make the wretched cashew or KDE4 component at fault behave sanely. Under KDE3, telling the session manager to remember the apps on each desktop worked beautifully. Now, with every single test of KDE4 since the past year has miserably humbled and belittled me. So, what happens is that every time i reboot or any time i end my session to clean up resources (yes, there are some leaks or some problems, and i inevitably have to reboot, or on the occasion that the suspend doesn’t wake up, i have to power off and reboot), the restat of KDE4 begins with my having to drag some 20 different opened apps to their respective desktops. Oh, the SIZES of the app windows get remembered, but not the desktop locations. Surely Mandriva knows this is an issue even if it is a KDE issue. IIRC, I never, EVER had this problem with PCLinuxOS. Even in PCLOS, 3D was working desktops with Compiz worked.

At some point, i just felt vanquished and gave up. It’s almost as if i feel i awoke from a sever sugar high and like a Pavlovian dog, i just feebly mumble and accept it. This should not be so. It also should not be very hard to search for and find answers.

Thank you for allowing me to vent.

Anyways the problem got solved by downloading the stuff manually. It would be useful for people who have bad net connection etc.

Thanks for adding your comment and giving the link to ttp://easyurpmi.zarb.org and http://doc.mandriva.com

Personally I use Slackware, but Mandriva is always the first choice of distributions which i recommend to other.

regards
Dexter

Don’t hesitate to read the doc at http://doc.mandriva.com