As I have already implied, I installed Mandriva Linux 2009 Spring on my EeePC 900. Mandriva is such a great Linux distribution and almost 100% EeePC-friendly. The first obstacle I had to overcome was the seemingly broken touchpad behaviour. The next obstacle I had to overcome was of much less importance: simulating ASUS EeePC Control functionality on Linux. Thankfully, there is a great software called EeeControl, but it wouldn't install on my new distribution. Hey, I am a Linux guy, so I had to fix this too. It wasn't that hard after all. Interested?

Mandriva Linux 2009.1 is a great Linux distribution, much more elegant than its predecessor. However, there is a serious "regression" to its predecessor. The Elantech touchpad of many netbooks and laptops - most notably all EeePC's - and probably other brands of touchpads behave oddly. For starters, there is no gesture support. Forget tap-to-click, two finger swipe for scrolling etc. Then, the pointer movement is jerky, as if the touchpad is acting as a touch screen!

This problem happened because Mandriva switched from defaulting to the proprietary Synaptics driver to the open-source generic mouse driver. While this switch should be acceptable for their Free edition, doing so in the Powerpack and One editions is - the least to say - annoying, as it totally ruins user experience, especially if you are a newbie. Thankfully, it's quite easy to fix!

As I had written about in the past, I am the proud owner of an EeePC 900 since December 2008. One of the things that was bugging me all that time was that it had to run on Windows. Frankly, I couldn't find a good reason to do so, as for the most part I was using Firefox, Skype and OpenOffice, all available under Linux. That, and it was extremely time-consuming waiting for that Windows XP to start up. So, I decided to install Linux on it.

Ever since Mandriva Linux 2008 Spring, the MySQL server included with the popular distro won't play out of the box (on most end-user systems, I have to be fair). If you try to spawn the service automatically, it will give you no reason as to why it won't start, causing a lot of frustration. Trying to spawn it manually with service mysqld start from a root command line will give you a nice, cryptic reply like:

ERROR: hostname cannot be localhost, mysql_install_db is quite unstable
https://qa.mandriva.com/show_bug.cgi?id=38398

Well... following the link to the Mandriva bug page will cause even more confusion! However, the solution is really, really simple! Just read on . This solution may apply to other distributions as well, but it has only been tested in Mandriva Linux 2008.1 and 2009.0

One of the most useful  extensions to PHP is suPHP which allows any PHP script to be executed under its owning user privileges. This helps in administering sites which need write access to their files (like, for example, Joomla! does for its tmp and log directories) without the need for an FTP layer or potentially dangerous permissions tweaking. Let's see how you can implement this functionality on a home brew server based on Mandriva Linux 2008.1

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.