[ltp] Mini Review & Questions about Mandriva Limited 2005 (Mandrake 10.2)

[Jeff]

Hi all,

I decided to try out Mandrake/Mandriva's new entry into the Linux
distribution market.  The installation went without any problems.
Below, I cover many of the items on my T42 that I use regularly.
Hopefully this will be useful to some.

Sound worked immediately without any intervention.  The beep wasn't
working so I had to load the pcspkr module at boot time.  Also, the
nvram driver wasn't loaded by default for tpb so I had to load that
as well.  I use VMWare and since I did a fresh install (not an
upgrade) I only had to reinstall the software and that also worked
great.  Wireless seems to work pretty well without too much
configuration.  PCMCIA data cards work.

Now for the first and hopefully easiest question.  The ibm_acpi
module loads by default but it doesn't like any parameters are
passed to it.  With mdk10.0, I needed to pass hotkey=enable,0xffff
to ibm_acpi to get all the function keys to work, particularly Fn-F3.
Since mdk10.2 is now loading ibm_acpi somehow by default (it's not
in any of the /etc/mod* files), what's the proper way to pass that
parameter?

By default, X-windows came right up and the glx driver seemed to
work (I ran glxgears).  However, I had some trouble getting the
external CRT to display (it didn't).  I modified the xorg.conf with:

    Option "MonitorLayout"              "LVDS, CRT"

but that didn't help.  I decided to install ATI's driver
Xorg v6.8.0/v8.12.10.  NOTE: the kernel module will NOT compile by
default!  I found some patches that need to be applied before
attempting to compile it.  Once applied, the module compiled and
loaded fine for me.  I found the patches at:

   http://ati.cchtml.com/show_bug.cgi?id=110

After installing ATI's driver, I was able to get the CRT to work but it
severely flickers and the resolution is slightly off.  The pixels go
out of the range of the picture on monitor -- adjusting the monitor
doesn't help and I don't think it's trying to run at something it's
not able to.  I created a 1280x1024 window and it opened smaller than the
picture (which should be 1400x1050) and this is the same monitor I was using
when I ran mdk10.0 at 1400x1050.  This is the second question -- any other
ideas I can use to try and solve this?

For this question, I've attached my X log, config file, modules list, and
fglrxinfo output.  Any assistance would be greatly appreciated.

Also, if anyone has any questions regarding installing this distribution, I'll
do my best to answer.

Thank you very much!

-Jeff

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