Hi. I have recently tried the mettise desktop environment with gnome 2.18 and can not take any screen shots. I also can't run any opengl applications.

I use mandriva free spring 2007.1
I get an error that basically says broken pipe/

Metisse is made of a modified version of fvwm and a special X server called Xmetisse on top of Xorg.
You can see that in a terminal window (assuming you have only one graphical session running):
should give you very different results. (try: echo $DISPLAY; you'll see it is not ":0" in Metisse)

It is normal (in its current experimental state) that Metisse cannot run 3D-related software. You can still run those applications as above with "DISPLAY=:0 " before the command, but then the window that opens doesn't have borders because there's no window manager on display :0.

I didn't know for the screen shots; maybe it is related...

Yves.

Any screen shot I take turns out black.

you can take screenshots by super-key (windows key) plus f on your keyboard.