Hello folks!

First let me apologize to you all as I am a certified Linux n00b. I am not, however, an idiot, I am simply (mostly) ignorant to the ways of Linux.

That being said, I would like to say I LOVE MCNLive, and I am (as are others) anxiously awaiting the release of MCNLive based on Mandriva 2008.

SO here're my problems:
I have succesfully burned Toronto and installed it to my USB flash drive. I am running off of it right now, in fact. I am running on a work-issued Thinkpad T60. But two problems are causing me much annoyance:

1. I can't adjust resolution! When I go to Display settings (by right-clicking the desktop and selection "Configure Desktop...", my only options are 800x600 or 640x480. As you can imagine this is very bothersome. So I loooked around and found various suggestions to modify the xorg.conf file. Here is the section that seems to be controlling possible resolutions, and it seems that I should have the option of 1024x768 regardless of color depth (in fact, I haven't been able to figure out where to find the color depth settings).


When I look at MCC hardware, it correctly identifies my graphics card as the Radeon Mobility X1400, so why doesn't show supported resolutions in the GUI?? And in this, when I adjust video card settings, it shows the resolution as 1024x768 16bpp. Why are there are two (different) resolutions shown?? And why would it say the

2. This may be related, but 3D Desktop Effects are disabled. This is a relatively minor item, but I did try out Mandriva 2008 One LiveCD and it worked beautifully (resolution was higher, 3D effects worked, etc). I actually *really* liked the Metisse effects too...

Also, when I make changes to the settings, it seems like they are not in effect when I reboot! I thought that since this was running from USB flash, that you would be able to maintain a customized setup?

I apologize for all the newbie questions, but I have searched through the forums and I couldn't find anything that really helped...

Thanks (in advance) for your help and I really appreciate the work you've put into making the MCNLive distro!!

-Steve

Also I have a docking station and an external NEC Flat panel I'd like to be able to extend my desktop to... but one thing at a time, I guess...

No idea on the dock & external display. I have a T60 as well and what you have to do is to change the driver from fbdev or whatever to vesa. You can do this from MCC, no need to edit the conf files by hand.

For 3d acceleration, you need the ati drivers installed. You can install these using the package manager. However the driver install and the vesa setting will not stay across a reboot. What I did was to create a persistent loop, reboot, do the vesa and driver install, set the syslinux.cfg to boot the persist option by default.

No more problems with the resolution!

Awesome! Thanks so much for your help. Out of curiosity -- where is the persistent loop image stored? Is it stored by default to the USB flash drive I'm booting from?

And anyone else have ideas of how to extend my desktop to an external LCD monitor? Right now the LCD just displays exactly what my built-in LCD shows...

indianseason, sorry for my poor knowledge of this, but I am trying to do as you recommended, and I am running into some problems... did you have to edit syslinux.cfg file while in a different system (as once I've booted into MCNLive, it won't allow me to write to this file)?

But once I selected the vesa driver and logged into a second session, resolution was nice (hooray!) and 3D desktop worked...

Oops, didn't see the wizard for setting up the persistent boot... :*)

OK I've figured out how to create the loop image for persistent boot, I've succeeded in editing syslinux.cfg to make persistent boot default and I've succeeded in switching the drivers to the vesa drivers...

BUT NOW when I try to switch on 3D desktop, it freezes my machine! It doesn't seem to matter whether I choose cube workspace or Metisse...
Also I find it odd that it doesn't detect whether or not my laptop is plugged in, I can't control brightness of the display or set the cpu speed to auto.

Any more help would be great... especially figuring out how to enable 3D desktop would be nice. And being able to view remaining battery charge would be cool, too.

1. You'll have to use the ati drivers for 3d - vesa only supports 2d
2. for the cpu control & getting plugged in / battery status to work, you'll have to enable acpi from MCC (configure services). Set acpi to start on boot. Unfortunately, I cannot get the backlight brightness control to work...

OK I'm sorry -- could you give me a little clearer instruction here? If I use the ati drivers, then I have the resolution problems, and 3D desktops are grayed out (disabled). If I use the vesa driver, my resolution problem is solved, but enabling 3D desktop does not work.

ACPI is enabled, but battery status does not work. I noticed that I can get CPU freq control to work (though it doesn't seem to be dynamic/automatic), it's set by power scheme. But battery status still does not work...

If this question is too stupid to bothering answering, could someone at least point me to some docs I could read that might help me out?

I have an ATI chipset card on one of my PCs and 3D is working and I can adjust my resolution fine. The card I have is X700 Pro 256 MB PCI-e. You should use the proprietary drivers (made by ATI/radeon - not open source, if still free). I think I have the latest ATI drivers for that in that said PC, BUT: unfortunately, I don't have that PC on at the moment and my wife is sleeping and I cannot turn it on without waking her. Sorry!

Anyway: have you installed the latest ATI-Radeon drivers? I cannot remember the names of the drivers, but if you go into MCC and look for 'ATI' and 'radeon' I'm sure you'll find it.

Oh, just as an end-note, I tested MDV2008 One on my work-laptop and it worked fine. It has (if memory serves me right) an ATI mobility radeon X1300. It was a test I made w/ the new Mandriva and the 3D worked fine on that HW.