Hey all! I was recentally using redhat and got comfortable with that, so I then had this brilliant idea of installing mandrake 7.1 instead. Alltho redhat has alot more configuring to do, that leaves less to do afterwards.

I have a few questions about Mandrake so I can get it performing allrite, so I can have an honest opinion on it.

Here are my questions:
- How do I change the resolution of Xwindows?
- How do I un-install all of the windows-managers that I dont use?
- How do I set up grub to boot Windows ME by default?
- How do I fix the terrible lag when starting gnome? (figure after I get some of the packages out of the way, It will go a touch faster. Redhat was fast on this comp!)

I didn't think it was all that bad, But the resolution was too low, and it wouldn't let me do much installation wize on a about a 1 gig partition.

Whell, thankyou everyone!
Jude

Well first off - I do agree - MDK sucks - at least for those of us who prefer a streamlined system. They tend to throw in a bunch of proprietary add-ons to the kernel and other software that makes it very hard to modify. But anyhow, each to his own.

Secondly, to change your X resolution, you need to run 'xf86config' and reconfigure your X setup. OR if you think you're familiar enough with the text file, you can edit /etc/XF86config and /etc/XF86config-4 and do it manually... but I wouldn't recommend it.

As far as the different window managers, you ususally just have to uninstall the RPMs associated with each WM. I can't tell you specifically what those are, you'll just have to do some research. Try doing a:

rpm -qa > myrpms.txt

and then looking at that file with your favorite viewer and see what you have installed. Most filenames are pretty self explanitory. Then, deinstall the ones associated with the WM you don't want. Do this by typing:

rpm -e filename

Be careful though, because sometimes this will break a lot of other things. For instance, if you want to wipe out Gnome, I would suggest keeping the gnome-libs file, as many programs require the Gnome libaries to work properly.

As far as GRUB, I'm not real sure, I still use LILO. If it's anything like LILO, there is a " default= " line in the /etc/lilo.conf file that tell LILO the default label to boot to. I'd look for the same in your GRUB config file.

And finally for the slow starting of Gnome.. that could be for a lot of reasons. Either you have a lot of services running in the background .. I'd check that... or possibly you are running a newer version of Gnome than you were before. In that case, there is more code and more overhead then before. I remember Gnome a few years back was really fast, now it's a lot more boggier with all the improvements unless you have a blazing fast machine. The more overhead you have and processes running, the slow you will be. Deleting programs isn't going to help.

You can take the exact same setup on a say Pentium II 450, and run the exact same setup again a year later on the same computer, except with newer version of code, and see a 50% difference in speed.

Whell.. I got the resolution back to 1024 X 786, alot of the RPM's that I don't use un-installed, and grub booting M.E. by default. I tried messing around with some of my drivers, But then I realized I had to log in as root to do what I had to do.. I then logged out, Clicked on the root icon, entered my password, and bam! big background screen and nothing else! haha.. Could you tell me the console command to switch to root clearence without having to log in to the roots desktop? I just have to compile and install a driver from the console, and it won't lemme do this as a standard user.

thankyou!
Jude

After you login with your normal account type:

su

and enter the root password. This will log you in as root. Then type ' exit ' when you are done performing root commands.

OR

If you have SUDO installed on your system you can type:

sudo command

and it will launch the command as root. Be sure to have your name in the /etc/sudo.allow config file as well before using this command.

You might also try copying everything from your home dir. to /root - which will copy your current configs to the root user.

cp -R -f $HOME/* /root

and

cp -R -f $HOME/.* /root