I’ve been installing the new Mandriva 2010.0 RC2 distribution on various of my notebooks, netbooks and nettop this morning. Well, trying to, anyway. It has turned out to be a bit more difficult than I had expected. I can only speak about the Mandriva One KDE LiveCD, as that is the only one I have tried, but I would assume that this is true at least for all of the One LiveCD versions.
The first problem is that the LiveCD failed to boot on my Fujitsu Lifebook S6510, which is really a pretty standard Intel Core2 Duo system with an Intel 965 graphic controller, and on my HP Pavillion dv2-1010ez, which is a not-so-standard AMD Athlon Neo CPU and ATI Mobility Radeon 3410 graphic controller. What I finally found was that Mandriva is still trying to auto-generate their own xorg.conf file, on those two systems they got it sufficiently wrong that the X display server couldn’t even start. However, they are using the latest X.org server (1.6.4), which is plenty smart enough to figure out everything it needs to know on its own, so it doesn’t need an xorg.conf file. So the solution was to just login as root on the text console, delete the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf, and then run startx to get the X display server going so that you can then use the LiveCD graphic installer as usual.
The second problem is that after installation, at least on the S6510 (Intel 965 graphics), the screen resolution was incorrect (1024×768 rather than 1280×800). Once again, the problem is that they tried to auto-generate an xorg.conf file, and got it wrong, and once again the solution is to just delete (or rename, if you are very conservative) the xorg.conf file. Then reboot, or otherwise restart the X server, and all should be well with the world.
In fact what I have done is delete the xorg.conf file after the installation completes, even on those where they “got it right”, because it’s not necessary and I don’t see any benefit to having it any more. I have checked screen resolution, keyboard maps and such, and it all seems to work just fine. If anyone should try this and find a system which does not work properly, I would be very interested in hearing about it.
jw
