Doctor Praetorius

Thank you for those instructions, artic! Well, as I am a Linux newbie, the home partition suggestion makes no sense to me. Are you saying create a duplicate partition that I could go back in case the current partition becomes corrupted? My sister is already angry that it's taken me 5+ months to finally get around to working on her laptop. Procrastination is bad.

:wall: :wall: This all started because I could not get KXdocker to function properly. I did an uninstall of some packages followed by a series of half-finished updates (half-finished meaning they would not complete due to errors). Now my sister's install of Mandriva Linux is completely hosed. It's almost a fresh install. The only thing I need to backup is her KMail. The thing is, there's no export option in KMail. How/Why is there no export function?! I am VERY angry right now.

Forget it, I found it under Control Center > Hardware > Change Screen Resolution.

By default, KDE is stretching the aspect ratio of my Dell Inspiron 6400 laptop display from 4:3 to 16:9. As a result, everything appears slightly "squashed" or "stretched" (most noticeable when viewing movies or looking at photos of people's heads). How do I change this to display correctly?

My sister would like Mandriva Linux installed on her laptop. She will be using it only to send/receive e-mails and to browse the web. Any word processing, etc. will be done via XP and Microsoft Office. She has a 120GB hard drive. How many GBs should I dedicate to Mandriva's partition? She has close to 8GB of e-mails she'd like to keep, I'd like to add to that capacity to account for space reserved for future e-mails. I would appreciate recommendations before I proceed with the install.

I want install Amarok as my MP3 player. I'm coming from a Windows background with almost no Linux knowledge. I was directed to a repositories directory here: http://kevin.deldycke.free.fr/repository/m...va/2007.0/RPMS/ What do I do now? I AM TOTALLY LOST. :unsure:

Okay, I got it. Thanks guys for all your help. I'm lovin' Mandriva!

Yes, I am using Mandriva 2007. I don't recall specifically being asked to enter a root password. There WERE a couple times when I was asked to enter a password and I entered blanks both times because I didn't want to bother with remembering passwords.

Another question, Linux is a fresh install. I don't recall setting a password for root. Would it be the same as the user account password... which happens to be blank.

Okay, backing up a bit... I tried using Kate to edit lilo.conf and got the following error: "Access denied. Could not write to /etc/lilo.conf.part." So I tried using vi and vim and got this error: "W10: Warning: Changing a readonly file" As I said, I am completely new to Linux.

Thanks!

I read the FAQ on boot loaders. It says after editing "lilo.conf" to run it in a terminal. How do I do that?