Bottom panel is erratic - and other problems . .

[Rowan]

Hello all
I am new here and I am saying hello.
I recently downloaded and installed Mageia4 on my desktop to replace Mandriva 2010.2 - mainly because skype was giving trouble by shutting down for no reason. My wife was getting quite scratchy about this happening. I was unable to get sound working on skype so I reinstalled 2010.2 and now I find that the panel bar along the bottom of my screen has a mind of its own. Icons move around with each reboot and minimized screens are superimposed under various application buttons.

When I did the installations I formatted sda5 only - should I have reformatted the whole system?? If need be I can get an external drive to hold my ´home´ directory files. After reinstalling 2010.2 I found that the colour scheme I had chosen for M4 had carried over to the new system - what gives?

I also found that the clock in M4 is white/silver on a white background - is there any way to make the clock black. I don´t want to change the colour of the panel as I like the lighter look.

Lastly does anybody know a simple and precise way to make skype (4.2.0.11 I think) work properly in M4? I have a Logitech C615 camera with built in mic. I have searched in various places but have not been able to find instructions that are easy to follow and work straight away. I am not technically minded and liked the various Mandrake/Mandriva systems because they were easy to use.

Please excuse the long-winded questions and any help will be very much appreciated.

[doktor5000]

Pretty simply, you kept the contents of your /home partition, which holds all per-user settings.
Simply create a new user, and try with that user if the issue persists. Then we'll have a look into migrating over your settings.

For Skype we have a MAQeia: viewtopic.php?f=36&t=1121

[Rowan]

Thanks for the reply. I am thinking that I will save everything I want from /home and then just reformat the whole system and start from scratch. What is confusing about the bottom panel is that I always put various icons in the same place for convenience so this moving around is perplexing.

Also I have Mageia4 installed on my old Acer laptop on wifi and it installed and works fine - nothing moves about with each turning off and on. Last night I installed skype (just out out of curiosity) and plugged in my camera. Lo and behold - trumpet fanfare - skype works perfectly with NO tuning needed at all. It is working with the standard pulseaudio system as stock standard. It sounds like my desktop is retaining ´ghost´ images from previous installations and this is messing things up.

I have also noticed that my broadband internet is very slow now - I am having to wait about 30 seconds for even the simplest page to load up. This is probably related.

I will try the reformatting and hopefully everything will be ok again.

[doktor5000]

You don't need to reinstall everything, you can surely still do that later if you really like to, but first try to see where the problem comes from.
So please, only create a new user and login as that user to see if the problem persists.

Apart from that, as a general hint and golden rule: Please only one problem per thread.

[Rowan]

Sorry I have not got back to you earlier but I have ben quite busy with work and other things.
I have not had a chance to go any further but I plan to reinstall M4 to make my system trible boot - Windows 7, Mandriva 2012.2 and M4. Then I will have a better chance to see how it goes.

Rowan

[jiml8]

When I migrated from Mandriva 10.2 32 bit to Mageia 2 64 bit, I did it as a clean install of Mageia 2 with my /home preserved, and I then reconfigured Mageia 2 largely with the contents of /etc from Mandriva.

I then had to fix a lot of things. If I recall correctly, I simply deleted the .kde4 directory in my home directory in order to let the new version build its own configuration files. The reason is that KDE had evolved considerably in the years between the release of KDE 4.4 (in Mandriva) and the KDE 4.8 that I got with Mageia 2.

Fixing things was much easier and quicker than trying to reconfigure my entire system because I have a really big system. I had the whole thing done in about a day.

Point is that you should expect some issues with that kind of migration forward, and once you have migrated forward, you can't go back.

Skype also was a bit troublesome for me. I "solved" the issue by just loading the copy of skype that had worked in Mandriva 10.2...that worked fine. Since that time, I am not sure but I think skype has been automatically updated once or twice and it works. I do sometimes have problems with sound upon bootup, so I start skype, open preferences, go to the audio section, open pavucontrol from the audio section, then - with pavucontrol open - I make a skype test call. After that, the audio works without incident until I have to reboot for any reason. Why do I have to do that? Dunno, and I have not dug into it to fix it.