I finally did it and got the Mdk10 Official ISOs to install on my box. I've been running RH 9 and for some reason (I don't know why) I'm not interested in the whole Fedora thing.

Anyway, after a short trial and error process of burning the CDs to make them bootable, I finally installed Mdk10 on my Box.

I'm running a Dell 2350, P4 1.8ghz, 768 Ram, with a nVidia GeForce2 MX200 (32MB) graphics card.

The install goes well, and I can configure all my options (printer, nics, etc) but when I try to boot after the install, I get a whole slew of kernel panic messages and a bunch of memory dumps (which I can't post because they scoll too fast and I can't get a prompt to cat them somewhere).

Now, I think I may have figured out on possible problem, but I'm hoping one of you here can just verify that this is it (I'm at work now and thought of this on the way in today).

When I initially configure the graphics card, Mandrake detects my integrated card, but not the nVidia card. Natuallly, I've been changing it to use my nVidia card, but then I got to thinking, maybe I need to use the default first, then install the driver / kernel module from nVidia, config my XFree86Config and inittab files and reboot.

Could that be the problem? I would have thought the Mandrake 10 would already have the drivers available and loaded, but for some reason, I can't boot.

I've googled this problem, checked the nVidia, dell, and Mandrake sites to little avail. Maybe I missed something???

Any ideas? Thoughts, Comments, observations???

Thanks

If you purchased official then CD4 should contain a NVIDIA package... if not then you need to download it and install it.
http://www.nvidia.com
choose the drivers/linux and the NVIDIA driver.... *.run

download this to somewhere /home/bcarl/..... etc.
then
init 3
login as root
cd /home/bcarl (or whereevr)
sh NV.....run (use tab command completion )
then follow the instructions about adding nvidia in the /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 file....
good luck

Great, thanks for the quick reply. That's kinda what I thought was the problem. I try that when I get home tonight.

I'll let you know how it works out.

bcarl314

Try hunting around in the BIOS settings and see if you can disable the integrated graphics. That may prevent some headaches later on.

Actually, I've already disabled the integrated graphics to use the nVidia card, but I'm thinking the problem is that I don't have the driver for the card, so the system hangs on boot. I'm basically going to try this...

1) enable the on board card
2) re-install using the default settings.
3) Update the nVidia driver
4) edit the files (/etc/inittab , XFree86Config)
5) reboot
6) disable on board card

Hopefully that will do it!