[Westwales] Mandriva and dual monitors, among other things

[Colin Sauze]

Jon Pearse wrote:

>   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.

You have dual output card or two cards?
I've never tried to do a dual monitor setup, but I believe that the 
card's drivers must support this as well as configuring X correctly. I'm 
not sure what type of drivers you get for ATI cards, I know with NVidia 
cards there is an open source one which ships with most distros that 
doesn't support a lot of features (like 3d acceleration!) and then there 
are closed source drivers available from them which offer lots of extra 
features. I don't know if you'll be able to get hold of PPC drivers for 
your card.

>
>   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?


Type cat /etc/resolv.conf and check the dns setttings are ok in there. 
Try using tcpdump or ethereal to monitor the lookups which take place 
(tcpdump -i eth0 port 53 usually works) you should be able to see what 
address your applications are actually trying to request and any 
responses they get.

>
>   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...


Suse makes similar attempts to Mandr(ake/iva) to make things easy. With 
either one you can still dig around in all the good old config files and 
those changes should be reflected by the GUI tools if you do ever have 
to use them. There are also plenty of 3rd party tools which will work, 
personally I quite like webmin which lets you configure most things 
through a web interface (mandrake usually installs this by default, 
should be on your CDs at least).