Guest Maillion Posted May 3, 2003 Report Share Posted May 3, 2003 Well, I've spent two days perusing the various forums, and this one seems the most appropriate one for my questions, so here goes... First, a little of my recent history with Linux: I decided to try Linux as a possible means of getting out from under the iron boot of Microsoft. I figured the best way to become familiar with Linux was the same way I became familiar with Microsoft; by first learning the cammand interpreter (the shell), so I decided to install in such a way as to put me into the shell, with the gui's as options. The first distribution I tried was Red Hat, either v 5 or 7, I forget which. I couldn't get either grub or lilo to work, and eventually gave up for several months. After a while I tried Debian, but got a bad install disk (apparently a bad iso image) and after trying several times to get the disk fixed, I gave up again. A few weeks later I tried Mandrake, either v 8.2 or 8.3, and had my first success. The only problem I had at this time was that it would start the gui at bootup, instead of leaving me in the shell. By this time I was rather tired of installing and reinstalling, so I stood pat for a while, until for some reason, my seven year old garanddaughter's favorite game, Frozen Bubble, suddenly stopped working, so I began to try to find ways to get it back. I could not find a replaement, so I decided to reinstall. I figured that if I was going to reinstall anyway, I might as well have the latest and greatest, so I downloaded Mandrake 9.0. Again, I had no problems installing, but the game still didn't work. The main advantage to the upgrade was that with a little help from my son-in-law, I managed to get Mandrake to boot up and leave me in the shell instead of launching the gui. I was going happily along trying to learn shell scripting, when my stepson began having problems with his Win 98 system. we eventually decided to eliminate Windows and install Linux, so I decided to see if there was a new version available. I found 9.1, and downloaded it. In the meantime, my son-in-law downloaded Red Hat 9.0 and installed it on my stepson's machine, so I decided to put Mandrake 9.1 on my machine. I only had two minor problems during the actual install, one was a disk read error, which occurred in the second and fourth attempts,but not in the subsequent attempt. The other was more interesting, and may be some sort of bug in the install. It occured on the first install atempt in both 9.0 and 9.1. The install program has several options, one of which is the basic unattended version where the install is supposed to work without bothering the user much. It gives a progress box with a little slide show of ads lauding the new version's features. It would get just so far and then lock up. When this happened in 9.0, I clicked on the 'details' button on my next attempt, in hopes of finding the point that it was stopping. The install then went all the way through without a hitch. When it happened again in 9.1, tried 'details' again, and it worked again. Most of you wouldn't use this non-interactive mode, so you may not have encountered this problem. Intuition suggests that the problem may be some sort of popup box requesting user input that the automatic install fails to let you see. So, what are my problems? 1. KDE won't run. Period. Some clues: When I first got it to install, I had a problem with setting my monitor resolution. Under Windows, I can use 1152x864 max, 9.0 didn't want to allow me to set anything above 800x600, with 16 million colors. I finally got it to accept 1024x768, but with only 65000 colors. While struggling with this, I missed the point where you can tell the system to boot to the shell only, and on bootup it seemed to be trying to launch the gui, then failing and defaulting to the shell. I didn't mind this too much, because that's what I wanted anyway, but I knew that such a failure couldn't be good for the system, so I tried again. this time accepting the defaults, and this time I remembered to tell it not to autmatically launch the gui. This time, when I typed startx to get the gui, the screen blinked several times, a few white rectangles (perhaps aborted dialogs) appeared, then vanished. In the end, I was back at the shell prompt. I decided to do without KDE, and try Gnome. I just unchecked the KDE checkbox during install. this worked, after a fashion. Everything seemed to work fine, except that when I got into Gnome, I got no priveleges, even as root. The Gnome main menu was nearly empty. I tried again, this time unchecking the Gnome box, just for the halibut. The result was the same as all the other times I tred KDE - no luck. I tried one more time, with reasonable success, except KDE still doesn't work. Everthing else I tried is OK. Any ideas? 2. The Gnome main menu has several KDE related programs listed, none of which work. This could have something to do with the problem detailed above. Is there any way to remove these unusable menu items? Has any one else had any problems with KDE under Mandrake 9.1? Sorry about the length of this post, and I will try to be more concise in the future. TIA, Johnny Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted May 3, 2003 Report Share Posted May 3, 2003 Welcome to Mandrakeusers Board. A couple of other items needed for gaining a better idea of solving your problem(s): Could you please list your hardware, if you know it. If you are not familiar with the components, please state the model and brand of your computer. Were there ever any odd sorts of problems that occured while running windows? Your problems are characteristic of hardware or disk errors (the disk you burned) It is easier to determine with the requested info. Which reminds me, did you burn the iso's yourself? If yes, did you do a checksum (md5sum) to verify the integrity of the download? Sorry for all the questions, but chances are really good that we here in this forum can resolve your issues. :) Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
aru Posted May 4, 2003 Report Share Posted May 4, 2003 Also in the meanwhile you can take a look to the errata page to see if any known bug affects your hardware: http://www.linux-mandrake.com/en/errata.php3 Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Guest Maillion Posted May 4, 2003 Report Share Posted May 4, 2003 First of all, thanks to each of you for the prompt responses. I really appreciate that! Second, I must apologize for not reading through to the end of all the threads in this forum before opening my big mouth! I may have found my answer in one of them. You see, I have a cheapo svga video card that apparently tells the world that it is an S3 Virge. It isn't. Near the end of another thread, I found a description of other problems with the S3 chipset, and I may have also found the solution to my problem there. Before I bore you with details of my system, I will try what I found there. Thanks again, Johnny Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ixthusdan Posted May 4, 2003 Report Share Posted May 4, 2003 Excellent!! I have found the search function to be very useful on this board. :wink: Quote Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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