[Westwales] Mandriva and dual monitors, among other things

[Jon Pearse]

   Well, Debian really did not like booting off the FireWire drive at 
all, so I downloaded Mandriva 2005LE last night and decided to have a 
bash with that... and it worked.

   Two things, though:
   First, I have a dual monitor setup and I can't find any way of 
getting Mandriva to recognise this - consequently, it's putting 
everything on the smaller monitor, which is annoying. Any suggestions 
as to how I could get it to recognise the second monitor and use it... 
Even if it mirrored, it'd be better than nothing. My graphics card is a 
32MB ATi Rage Mobility M7.

   Second, I've gone around and set up all the network settings I can 
find, but Firefox takes 30 seconds to get past "looking for 
<hostname>", and gaim just plain can't connect. Conversely, running 
'dig' at the commandline returns a result almost instantaneously. Is 
this a 'feature' of Mandriva, or is there something I've missed 
somewhere along the line. If it is something I've missed... any ideas 
what it is?

   That said, Mandriva has yet to impress me so far - the GUI installer 
is a lot more friendly than my experience with Linux so far (Debian, 
YellowDog 2.3) but ... I'm not hugely liking some of the control panel 
stuff - it's a little overly klunky for my liking. My final option is 
SuSE, so if anyone can make any comparison between that and 
Mandrake/Mandriva (like, is it better/worse/whatever), then I might 
have a bash at that as well. Otherwise, I might take a poke at 
YellowDog 4...

   Cheers,

-Jon

-----------------------------------------------------------------------
  http://www.jonpearse.net                            jon at jonpearse.net
  AIM/Skype: JonDPearse                      Phone: +44 (0)78 1260 2710

  Some people come into our lives and quickly go. Some stay for a while
  and leave footprints on our hearts. And we are never, ever the same.
-----------------------------------------------------------------------