I am very clueless when it comes to Linux and I really want to learn. Since I can't trade my Home xp edition for 64 bit I decided
to go with Linux instead. I order Mandriva online and installed it on my spare hard drive on my laptop. Everything went smoothly and I was really impressed how easy it was to install.
Here's the problems, I have 15.4 screen and the software detected my video card and Nvidia (generic) and it did not take up the whole screen only 75% of it. The only resolution that I can set is 1280X768. So, I monkeyed around see if I can get it to fill up the whole screen. When I reboot the system all I see was blank screen and when I boot to safe mode all I got was something similar to dos promt and kept asking to log in and it won't take my user name or password. So, I decided to re-install the software again from scratch and erase & format the whole hard drive. Now when I boot up instead of going to the normal screen that I normally get the first time I get the promt and ask me to enter user name and password again.
What did I do wrong ? How do I get to boot up to the normal screen instead of the promt and how do I make it to fit the whole screen instead of just 75% of it.

Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Compaq 3240US
3200+ AMD 64
512 MB ram
60 Gig hard drive.

You most likely need to:

1. Specify a modeline for your resolution in your X.org/XFree86 configuration file (usually /etc/X11/xorg.conf or /etc/X11/XF86Config(-4), respectively) and tell X to use the modeline. Here is the monitor section from my nx9105 (an R3000z model branded by HP instead of Compaq) which has a 1280x800 display:2. Pass one or two parameters to the nvidia module as it loads. With the current nvidia driver it seems only NVreg_Mobile=0 is needed. Add this to /etc/modprobe.conf:...and restart X.

For more information you might want to check out the R3000 Linux mailing list archives and/or the R3000 Linux wiki.


Håkan (pluggin the R3000 Linux resources constantly)