It's been a long time since ntfs-3g has been the de facto NTFS driver option for leading Linux distributions. This allows for very convenient interoperability with a variety of external storage media with great capacities, like external hard disk drives. One of the problems I faced during the last year of using it, is that when I used KDE's automount feature (actually, the media:/ kioslave) I got boxes in the filenames instead of Greek or other national characters. The solution turned out to be simple in concept, yet obscure in application.

Hibernating your machine is of paramount importance, especially if you own a laptop. It is not just a convenience; it is a necessity should you have to move in a hurry and don't have time to save everything and perform a proper shutdown. Albeit, Mandriva has not supplied a working configuration for the hibernation function out of the box, therefore we are going to fix it. The steps below worked for my Mandriva Linux 2008 x86-64 and x86 installations and will most probably work for other post-2007 distributions, even Mandriva Linux 2007 Spring, but - as always - there are no guaranties. At worst your box will not hibernate and you might end up with a corrupt swap space (which can be mended very easily anyway).

When I switched my desktop over to Mandriva Linux 2008 I knew it wouldn't be without some shortcomings. One of the most frustrating experiences I had was connecting my HTC Touch phone (a Windows Mobile 6 PDA phone) to my Linux box in order to synchronize it. I stumbled along the way, finding the not too apparent solution to my problem.

First of all, the reason why Mandriva couldn't connect to the device was some apparently faulty version of rndis_host driver that came along with the distribution. As a result, every time you upgrade the kernel, you'll have to follow these steps.