I downloaded the 3 cd's for Madrake Linux 10.1 During the install it told me to insert a fourth cd "KDE CD" I didn't have it so I aborted the installation. Will I still have the desktop environment without this cd? Why is it telling to insert cd 4 if the official download is only 3 cd's?

 
 
I am not a mandrake / mandriva expert but I have confirmed 10.1 comes on 3 CDs or one 2GB DVD ( 3 CDs worth ) as you can see below:
 
http://mirrors.kernel.org/mandrake [...] 10.1/i586/
 
http://wwwnew.mandriva.com/en/downloads
 
 
Did you choose Mandrake for a particular reason?
 
I like all distros but I think Ubuntu or FC5 may work better.
 
http://www.ubuntu.com/download
 
or
 
http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/c [...] 86-DVD.iso
 
http://fedora.redhat.com/Download/
 
Good Luck :-D

Well you are right! I had so many problems with mandrake. once I finally got it installed I had issues with it not being able to detect my graphics card (nvidia4) then once I actually got into the kde my mouse would stop working randomly and I would have to shut down. Then when I would go to shut down i would get a black screen with the mouse pointer (that didn't work) and it would just sit there and do nothing. I let it sit for 15 minutes before i was forced to hold in the power for 5 seconds
 
Anyway... I Installed Fedora Core 5 and It installed without any problems at all. Everything went smoothly. Found my graphics card no problem. I could even get a widescree display. Mouse works great and the system shuts down and starts up just fine.
 
 
I only have one question... i386/i586  whats the difference and how do I know what I need to get. I'm currently running an COMPAQ Presario R3000 laptop with an AMD 64 (3200 i think) and 1Gig of ram.

 
 
 
i386/i586 etc refers to the architecture the code is compiled / optimized for.
 
i386 = Intel 80386 ( 386 and 386 clones ) 32bit code
 
i586 = Intel 80586 ( Pentium and Pentium clones ) 32bit code
 
x86_64 = AMD64 architecture and Intel EM64T (Intel clone of the AMD64 instruction set)
 
 
You might want to try the Radeon drivers from ATI...
 
https://support.ati.com/ics/support [...] olderID=27
 
If your machine has a Radeon VGA or the nVidia drivers if you have an nVidia card:
 
For i386/i586 / IA32:
 
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux [...] -8178.html
 
For AMD64 / x864_64:
 
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux [...] -8178.html
 
If you have an AMD64 you can run FC5 x86_64 if you want.
 
http://mirrors.kernel.org/fedora/core/5/x86_64/iso/
 
 
You can find out what kind of hardware you have by opening a terminal / xterm / command prompt and running:
 
[code:1:ae171382cd]
cat /proc/cpuinfo
lspci
[/code:1:ae171382cd]

i keep getting this...
 
# lspci
bash: lspci: command not found

 
try  
 
[code:1:f26fd6bd38]
 
/sbin/lspci
 
[/code:1:f26fd6bd38]
 
If that doesn't work try:
 
[code:1:f26fd6bd38]
 
yum install pciutils
 
[/code:1:f26fd6bd38]
 
 
You can also do this:
 
[code:1:f26fd6bd38]
 
cat /proc/pci
 
cat /proc/meminfo
 
cat /proc/interrupts
 
# etc etc etc
 
[/code:1:f26fd6bd38]

 
I play around with GNU/Linux distros in my spare time (i.e. so I am not a fulltime Linux user yet!!)
 
My only comment would be (echoed on other forums) that Mandriva 10.1 is going backwards... (compared to the 10.0 edition from last year - speaking as a 10.0 paid Powerpack user)
 
It does not even have KDE 4.x yet!! I installed 10.1 (DVD version) on my desktop recently... I edited the Grub file to triple boot (Kubuntu KDE 4.x, Mandriva 10.1 and Windows XP x64). After rebooting the Mandriva Grub loader cannot see my USB Razor keyboard (the Kubuntu Grub loader could), the Mandriva installer still could not see my soundcard (the correct C-media driver, recently added to the Linux kernel), was picked up by Kubuntu. The Mandriva install hangs when I boot into it!! So basically except for the 3124 port-multplier support of the newer 2.6.24 kernel the 10.1 edition is worse than the 10.0 edition I previously tried.
 
I would highly recommend Kubuntu 8.04 edition (KDE 4.x) as it blew away my previous experience with Ubuntu 6.xx!! The forums are active and much more helpful than the Mandriva ones!! I posted on the Mandriva forums about my Silicon Image SATA controller not supporting port-multipliers under Mandriva 10.0 Powerpack. I was told to look on the Kernel forums!! I ended up looking at the source code for the kernel and worked out (after 2 hours of searching) that the driver had been updated with PM support from about kernel 2.6.24.x... No community = No support!
 
At last a distro (Ubuntu/Kubuntu) which is moving forwards on the multimedia front!! All we need now is a unified GNU native media player to match the quality of Zoom Player and GNU/Linux might be a player on the desktop...
 
Bob