$59.00 Mistake

[bgast1]

I purchased Mandriva 2008 Power Pack thinking that it would be better, after all you get LinDVD, 3 Months e-training, and a 3 month subscription to Cedega.

Well, I downloaded it, burned it, installed it to my 2nd hard drive which I like to reserve for Linux only, and keep my 1st hard drive for Windows. It won't boot. I tried it several other times, redownloaded and reburned and installed again, still won't boot. Figured maybe something is wrong with my computer. Installed PCLOS, works like a charm. Well by this time I am determined to make it work. After all I spent money on it. Installed on my Windows hard disk and dual booted with Windows and Mandriva. This worked.

So I enter my registration key, decide to check out the e-training. Folks it ain't nothing special. I can get the same info from any other free wiki's or help files.

So, lets try Cedega. Go to install it and gives me a bad script error. Install it anyway, and then Cedega tells me my subscription is expired.

LinDVD--left me with big green line at the top when I go to play a DVD. Figured it was my DVD, got out of Linux, booted windows fired up CyberDVD or whatever it's called and the DVD plays fine, looks good, and no green line.

Long story short, reinstalled PCLOS on the same partition as Mandriva was. Just didn't feel like re-partitioning, and perhaps reinstalling windows and Linux all over. Still have some bugs to work out but not too big of a deal. Montior says resolution is 1600 x 1200 but looks like 800 x 600 to me. Everything is still big. Compiz-Fusion is working. I have 3D effects. If I go to the default monitor settings it will break my system. Supposed to be 1680 X 1050.

Might just try installing Wine, if I try to play games in Linux. I can still play them in Windows with no problem.

 

[GrandAdmiral]

Yea I have had some similar issues with Linux on Fedora and Ubuntu, regarding display resolution and compiz. When I enable effects it will often turn my screen resolution all the way down and a few times when I tried to fix it I ended up trashing my system. Have you updated the video card drivers? I guess if you got the effects to work then you probably have the right drivers. There's some issues with Linux and graphics drivers and there are several methods for installing them depending on what card you have. Sometimes you don't really have to do anything and sometimes you have to log out of X and go to the command line which sucks because one mistake and your screwed.

 

[bgast1]

At the PCLOS forum, one guy was kind enough to let me download his Xorg.conf file. I have a 22" wide screen monitor where the default resolution is 1680x 1050. PCLOS reports that my resolution is 1024x 768. But it really looks like it is 1680x 1050. Any smaller and I couldn't see it. I have the proper video driver installed, although they might not be configured properly. What I like about Linux is that it has all of the eye candy as Vista, and runs a lot faster and is a lot more stable once you get everything worked out. I personally like working from a shell, I am old enough to remember working from DOS computers. Still need to learn the commands though.