New to Linux, starting out with Mandrake 9

[friskydrifter]

I use PM7 on my Windoze installations, what's the prob with it? I've never had any. Except when Linux is installed it messes with the ext3 filesystems and damages the Linux install. It only seems to support ext2 filesystems.
But with just Windoze i got no probs ever.

[GeminiID]

I finally got Partition Magic 7 to play nice, I partitioned my 6Gb disk drive with a little over 2.8 Gb for Linux and a swap.

Only problems I've had installing is that the 2nd CD that I have with all the extras on it is F.U.B.A.R

The install progress bar stopped at 14 minutes to go and asked for the 2nd CD, and I put it in and thought all was well until those error messages started popping up, "Error installing package",
Anyhow to make a long story short, it took over 4 hours for the process to finish leaving me with a whole notebook page of errors.
And finally telling me that my CD rom drive or CDROM was damaged.

So, I asked the guy I got the CDs from to burn another 2nd CD of Mandrake and I should have it this week.

Man was I ill after seeing all those error messages, but I know I'll get it installed someday soon.

And I'll be posting more here every now & then.

Thanks for the help so far, you guys are great!

G-ID

[trommaster]

congratulations on not giving up!! ;D ;D ;D

[friskydrifter]

I dont know why but my 2nd Mandrake disk would work at first either, i just kept on retrying it everytime it said to put the disk in (about 12 times!!!) and then it worked?? After that i tried a reinstall again and it worked fine.

Something for the X-Files i think :P

That or maybe my cdrom is about to die Seems ok now tho?

[GeminiID]

Hey everybody,

Mandrake is up and running, I installed alot of stuff and it looks like it's handling it all pretty good. My sound works, it detected and installed the right drivers, my usb port works, my internal mouse on laptop works and my logitech wheel mouse works as well. I have yet to get it hooked up to my network at home and configure the internet but I figure I'll spend some time this weekend doing that.

I did run into a couple things that are making me frown. Hopefully you guys can help me with a solution.

#1- when setting up my display setting drake went for the highest my laptop could handle, i.e 1024X768, but after I logged in the screen isn't right.
I wish I could put a screenshot here so you could see it, but I'll try to explain it.
The desktop is centered, very small and there is a big black border around the desktop.
You know on a desktop monitor how they have buttons to adjust how wide or tall your dektop is?? So you can make general adjustments to move the desktop to cover the entire monitor.
Well my laptop doesn't have buttons to manually adjust the screen, but if you understand what I'm saying it sure could use some cause the desktop is way too small.

Then #2
I should not have tried this but I did, even with the screen problem. I tried to play chromium on mandrake last night and man did it act wierd, everything slowed down; the video and the sound and I couldn't get out of it so I had to turn the laptop off and start over again. Any ideas on this??
I mean I've loaded all kinds of games on windows over the year with some pretty stiff requirements, even put Thief Gold on my laptop which ran good btw, so what's with games on linux??
I'm sure I need to get the display figured out first so if anyone has comments on that please post those first.

Thanks so much,

G-ID

p.s. glad i got linux up and going......whew!

[JimH]

#1) Are you sure you are running at 1024x768? What does this show?

xdpyinfo | grep dimensions

#2) What is the video hardware? I see you only have 2mb video. eck!

More then likely this card does not have DRI support. No DRI = super slow software rendering. :-\

Jim H

[GeminiID]

I just wanted to say thanks to everyone who gave me solutions or ideas on correcting problem I've encountered.

Mandrake is running pretty good now, the bootloader works great and the desktop is now correctly displayed. I switched to a different default monitor and changed the resolution.

Only thing that bugs me now is that that game chromium, super slow loading and the sound is choppy, haven't tried to play it because just loading it my laptop almost freezes up and it takes forever to close it out to the desktop. Any ideas on tweaking it??
Also, does anyone know where I can find info or docs on using the Konsole? I don't know the first thing about running commands & whatnot.

*JimH*, How can I find out if my video card does or does not have DRI support?? Can I find out in Windows or Linux??

I know it probably wouldn't be the greatest idea but I've more than once thought about overclocking this video card just a tad, not too much but just enough to improve performance.
Any thoughts??

Thanks once again for your help,

G-ID

[JimH]

What do these show.

glxinfo | grep -i "direct rendering"

/sbin/lspci | grep -i vga

Jim H