Linux install Problems mystery solved. Vector Linux is very good for old PC's I was able to install it well recently. Also Knoppix worked for me finally with the following command at boot:
knoppix 2 vga=normal lang=us

I installed FreeBSD again today. It worked out very well. The reason being that FreeBSD has an excellent text/graphics based configure utility to setup the XFree86config file as per the specific components in the users PC and their specifications. In my case this greatly helped to over the graphical limitations and I was able to use KDE.

Perhaps the same final config and related files can be copied to appropriate directories in Mandrake. However, with Knoppix, Vector and FreeBSD I am well covered for now.

Regards,

Vijay