>Anyway, I have been using Mandrake 8.0 for some time now, and I had downloaded the ISO images of the 8.1 install, so I installed 8.1. Everything was fine except for my Sound Blaster AWE64 ISA PNP. At first, I was not able to set the volume (the Sound Mixer apparently couldn't find anything, and I have cheap speakers without a "hardware" volume adjustment). Tried to mess things around by restoring my Sound Mixer config file and, of course, it got worse. Now every application that was trying to use sounds hanged.
>
>Ok, then, reinstalled 8.0 for the rest of the day. The next morning, I re-tried 8.1, with similar results. This time I looked around the net, and found some [obscure] reference to recompiling the kernel (never done this before). So that's what I did, asked me a whole bunch of questions I had no idea what it was, but not the questions that were mentionned in the web page. I figured I'd be re-installing 8.0 soon - which I did, since the new kernel was only able to throw "KERNEL PANIC" on every boot.
>
>From what I understand on the [obscure] web page, ISA and PNP isn't exactly perfection. Plus, on the Mandrake compatibility list, there are older SB and newer SB boards that are reported to work well. So maybe all I need is to get a new sound board, but I don't have the money these times to throw at this old PII - 266.
>
>So I'm back in Mandrake 8.0, but I'll check with a friend if I can borrow his sound board (SB Live) and try 8.1 again. I could also borrow his RealTek 8139 and try SuSE!
>
Hi Sylvain,
I had a similar problem. My sound card (SB32 PNP) worked in 8.0, but I couldn't get RealPlayer and a couple of other apps to work in 8.1. I ended up solving the problem by disabling the KDE sound server (ALSA? or something like that). I was able to re-enable it by setting the timeout to 1 second (I believe it defaults to 60).
>At least 8.0 does have ReiserFS! :)
Do you know if ReiserFS installs by default with 8.1? My hardware is not the most reliable with Linux, so it would be nice to recover from crashes more smoothly.
