Inspiron 6000 & Ati X300 And Mandriva 2005 Le
 

Hi all.
Been browsing this forum and google for a while now looking for a solution.
I am unnable to get my inspiron 6000 with 15,4 inch monitor and an ati x300 graphics card to work properly. I am trying to get Mandriva 2005 LE(DVD iso version) to work.

Put simply:

1: mandriva detects my x300 card during setup but X starts with a black screen.

2: when I manually try to find a suitable screen and resolution with XFdrake, I get the messages that "fglrx"(the vid driver) cannot work with 15,16,24bpp color depth.. (Ill post full error later... )

3: If i choose standard ati drivers(from the Xorg category in XFdrake) I get picture on the screen, but it is all garbled.. It looks like the refresh rate is all wrong.

4: if I change the monitors in XFdrake (i have tried just about every one.. ) I still get the refresh rates wrong.

Q: anyone know the exact specs for the screen on dell inspiron 6000(15,4 inch WSXGA)

Q: anyone know why the fglrx drivers complain about not supporting 15,16,or 24bpp color depth?

Offtopic Q: I read somewhere that Mandriva cant enable DMA because of some conflict with the SATA disk and dvd-burner when using the ata_piix driver..(the only one that can be used with the sata-disk in my experience). What does this mean, for practical purposes?

If anyone have some tips. plz help.

I am at work now, will post xorg.conf and whatever else needed as I get back home.

"Offtopic Q: I read somewhere that Mandriva cant enable DMA because of some conflict with the SATA disk and dvd-burner when using the ata_piix driver..(the only one that can be used with the sata-disk in my experience). What does this mean, for practical purposes?"

Bios A06 fixes this issue. I had no errors while burning.

well i havent been able to watch DVDs but im stuck on wether its vid drivers or dvd rom drivers... might be both.... so yea wait a minute, DMA doesnt even apply here its a SATA and ATAPI, but yea it still running slower than its suppose to in my case (not the HDD just the dvd-rom... i think)

this guy has got a fix/hack to sort out the dma problem. it's not specific to mandriva, it's happened to everyone. there's some sort of 'conflict' (inverted commas because it's not strictly true) between the SATA drive and the IDE drive - apparently it's trying to convince itself that they're both running off of the same channel. i'm buggered if i know how it could come up with such a statement, but that's what i've read elsewhere.