[Gloucs] Mandrake 8.2 on a Dell Inspiron 8100

[overs.worldonline.co.uk]

Hi Guys, 

I have recently installed this OS on the above computer, to dual boot with Win XP. The installation was painless, with 25gig allocated to Windoze, and 23gig to Linux. Most of the bits were found, the card modem correctly identified and configured, ditto sound card, but the video card, although correctly identified, could only be made to give a display by using the "other", "unlisted", "FBDev" route. The best it can manage is 1078x780 (or thereabouts) at 16 bits, but I bought this machine purely because of it's superb display capabilities (1600x1200 at32 bits). I've looked at the Nvidia site, found the drivers, looked at the readme section and given up the struggle!  Frankly, I have no idea what they are talking about. 

This is a shame, because I am totally bowled over by the whole Linux thing, stability, speed, almost infinite user choice, freedom from the Beast of Redmond, etc, etc, but at the age of 59, I don't think I can hack the command line interface in Unix, I can only speak a little DOS, and not too well either.  There are a number of other irritants that I can probably live with, but I may as well mention that the CD Re-Writer/DVD combo produces a start up message "cannot find dev/dvd- no such device available", when I ask to shutdown there is a message which first of all says " CDRom open failed, recovery thread got woken up", then, "Unmount Floppy, illegal request".

This means that I then have to shut down on the off switch, which produces the start up message "Your system seems to have shut down un-cleanly etc, etc". No damage is done, because I always remove any CD's manually, and the machine doesn't have a floppy disk drive, and I imagine all the system has received the "term" signal anyway, but it's all rather untidy.  The Mandrake control centre produces a blank screen when asked to identify the Hardware configured, an error message appeared when I tried to configure the printer, the Ispell appears not be available in any word processor, and so it goes on.

In case you think I'm being hard, I have to say that I am staggered and delighted with the way it's possible to open a file on the windows partition in Linux, or paste a document or spreadsheet written in a Linux application back into Windows, and then be able to open it in XP, I had no idea that this was possible, and I think a lot more people would at least try Linux if they knew.  For the un- initiated, it's quite scary to start using a different OS, and the possibility of transferring data from  existing files is very re-assuring, why isn't it made more of?

I know laptops are not the easiest of things to configure, once you stray from the makers installation, but Mandrake 8.2 was touted as being very able at hardware detection, and very user friendly, that's why I chose it, but this brilliant operating system will never find it's way into the wider public domain unless it can be installed with ease on a modern, well specified machine by people like me, curious, slightly rebellious, but not too clued up on computers!

Please restore my flagging enthusiasm by telling me that another distribution would be better (Mandrake 9,0?), or that the problems I have mentioned are easily fixed. If I'm honest, the only thing that really niggles me is the crappy display anyway, the rest I can live with.

System 

Dell Inspiron 8100, built Aug 2001 (on a Friday Afternoon, I suspect!), 1.1 gHz Pentium 3, 256mB Ram, 48gB hard drive, ESS Maestro sound card, Nvidia Geoforce Go2  video card, with 32mB on-board memory, 15.1" XG TFT Screen, Toshiba CDRW/ DVD combo, PC Card modem, no floppy drive, extra Lion instead.

Contact

mike@overs.worldonline.co.uk
BT: 01453 822768
Mobile: 07970 857815

Kind Regards,
Mike Overs