Upgrading to Mandriva Powerpack 2011 - Resolving the Pain Points

I recently had to upgrade three Lenovo G550 laptops to Mandriva Powerpack 2011. I have been a Mandriva user since the 90s, but I cannot say that this has been an easy upgrade - so much so that I have considered switching to Ubuntu instead. Anways I hope that these notes might help others solving some issues on the 2011 release.

Fails to start on first boot after installation:

Boot with failsafe the first time, the 2nd time normal boot will work. I don't know why it works, it is a stupid workaround.

Fixing segmentation faults in Mozilla Thunderbird:

This issue only occurs when using LDAP for login authentication. Starting nscd works around the problem, but for some reason nscd does not want to start at boot time. I have never been a fan of nscd anyway, I after having hours trying to get debug why nscd does not start I gave up and found a workaround in a BUG 291127.

cd /usr/lib64/mozilla-thunderbird-8.0
mv libldap60.so libldap60.so.REAL
ln -s /usr/lib64/libldap-2.4.so.2 libldap60.so

This is not really a satisfactory solution, as everytime I upgrade Thunderbird, I might need to fix the symlink again, but it got it going.

Autofs cannot mount NFS locations:

This appears to be name resolving bug in autofs 5.0.6. Solved it by doing

rpm -Uvh --oldpackage autofs-5.0.5-2mdv2010.1.x86_64.rpm

CD-ROM only works during installation:

Delete /dev/cdrom line from /etc/fstab as per Mandriva Errata.

Network errors on eth0:

If the ethernet adaptor according to lspci is "Ethernet controller: Broadcom Corporation NetLink BCM5906M Fast Ethernet PCI Express (rev 02)" then set the MTU=1000 (in contrast to default of 1500) as per a previous posting.

BCM4312 wifi driver:

If you are unlucky still to have Broadcom wireless hardware in your G550, then some work lies ahead. This specific hardware identifies itself to lspci as

Network controller: Broadcom Corporation BCM4312 802.11b/g LP-PHY (rev 01)

Mandriva gives you the option to use the new dkms-broadcom-wl package, but it simply did not want to install on the default 2.6.39 kernel due to DKMS build failures. I decided to settle for using the firmware-dependent b43 driver instead. For this the b43-fwcutter package had to be installed and the firmware downloaded from openwrt and unpacked - just follow the Mandriva instructions. It was also necessary to edit /etc/modprobe.conf and add the line

options b43 pio=1 qos=0 

(Src: OpenSuse Forums)

Finally setting MTU=1000 as was the case for the ethernet hardware, solved the dropping of packets.