I recently bought a Dell Inspiron 8600 Laptop and I wanted Linux on it.
I tried to install Mandrake 9.2 but when it came to the display I could not the display right. I saw a bunch of lines or nothing at all.

I have a nVIDIA 5650 128mb (latest driver too) with a 15.4" Wide aspect ratio screen. I looked up my video card and I didn't find it in the supported list with XFree86;

Is there a driver or display program for any linux that would work with my computer?

And did you look and notice the 5000 other posts about Nvidia having their own drivers for download right on their website, under the word. Drivers?

Now , Now Caeda , some people are slow so we have to speak slowly to them. But they usually only ride little yellow school buses. Kchess , now let me tell you from experience with DELLS. Let me guess , you dont have ACPI working , cant get a half decent X server to run , sound well sounds like crap and to top it off you found out that your girl is cheating on you with the football team. The entire football team . Well let me tell you when i first got a dell i had all those problems , well except the football team part. Jeez man learn to work it . Well what you wanna do is goto www.nvidia.com and goto the drivers page and download yourself a nice little linux driver . Get the newest one , I also recommend that you install redhat 9 or later for Dell. They seem to have the best support.
goto www.darktower.webhop.org/XF86Config and download that into your /etc/X11/ dir. after all of that it should be ok to go out side once again. And if you need help with your ACPI probelms (aka battery meter stuff like that) email me at darktower2g3@comcast.net or put an other post in here and ill show you how to setup that baby to perfetion.

Actually, Suse would be better than redhat for a Dell. Because Suse comes with the Toshiba and Dell laptop extra's patched in and compiled for full acpi support...

do you have a dell
cause last time i checked even with a full install of suse i think 9 , it supported my battery but nothing else it was a mess to get gkrellm to work right with the i8kutils that needed the right dell plugin and the plugins that your thinkin of work for the older insprirons and the other crap they used to put out.

The plugins I were thinkng of were the kernel acpi patches. As for how the computer actually uses it, it depends on if you set it up right. The point was, the extra code was compiled and ready in suse. Its not compiled at all or even present in redhat, you have to find it yourself.

Dell SUX! I got a new Latitude D500 with Intel 852/855 Chip, The Vga is ok but the Laptop Display is a Sh$%#t. Even the Latest drivers from intel will not solve problem, with 64 MB it detects 16 only and no monitor detected!
Even worse, no wireless card drivers are available from Intel for Centrinos.
The Icons seems to be like gaint than family size Pizzas.... wops....

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