Mandriva 2010.1 screen and keyboard freeze after login
 

I have been running Mandriva KDE for some time, quite successfully and have always been able to either upgrade or re-install new versions. Until 2010.1. The upgrade went OK and I logged in, only to have a complete freeze of screen, mouse and keyboard. I rebooted with Alt+PrtScr+B and the same result.

Has anyone else seen anything like this? Any recommendations gratefully received.

I don't think I´ ve ever had a successful upgrade, always some program wont work as it used to or something wont work or the whole system runs slow and I´ve ended up formating reinstalling and reinstalling all programs I like to use. I usually have success from a clean install and don't bother to upgrade any more at the moment I m deciding if Im going to spend the rest of the day changing to Mandriva 2010.1.

Speaking to a friend who runs Debian, he suggested that my problem lies in the ¨nouveau¨ video driver. My video card is Nvidia ‎NV5M64 [RIVA TNT2 Model 64/Model 64 Pro] which is probably not well supported by ¨nouveau¨. So I will have to try to find a legacy Nvidia driver and load it while the system is booted into single-user mode (failsafe boot).

Can anyone help me to find and load such a driver? I can (just) follow complicated instructions!!

I reinstalled Mandriva 2010.1 and selected nv as the video driver. I further selected a specific resolution - 1280 x 1024 - and ran the test. That went OK. I rebooted and am posting my reply from the result. Thanks to my debian friend who warned me off nouveau.