Hi,
I have Mandriva 2006 Free and I find it very good for most things. Everything works out of the box and I still get to learn from the CLI.
One niggle I have is that when I boot up from my laptop... during bootup the LCD screen shows the bootup sequence in the small 640x480 resolution rather than stretched across 1024x768. I prefer if Mandriva would leave that alone. But the setting to control that is not visible anywhere in the menus or /etc files when I look for it. Similarly the numlock is automatically turned on which I would also like to turn off. Had anyone suffered from that problem?
Thanks!

Start Mandriva Control Centre-->System-->enable or disable the system services and remove the check mark for numlock to start at boot.

You can set the boot screen resolution in MCC (System > Configuration > Configure your computer in the menu system).

Open MCC.

Select Boot in the Category list (left).

Open Set up how the system boots (main pane).

The first screen (Boot loader) configures the boot loader and sets the main options. What you want is in the second screen.

Click Next (bottom right).

Highlight the linux menu entry (main pane).

Click the Modify button (right).

Expand the Advanced options.

Choose the boot display resolution in the Video Mode drop down menu bar.

Click OK (bottom left)

Click Finish (bottom right).

HTH,

Wow Thanks Guys! Appreciated your answers. I thought it would be hard to track down the lcd screen resize. Will try this on Sunday.

Cool, the things you don't see when you don't look, thanks !!

You wouldn't know how to change the res of the screen before that one?, the one with the choice of what to boot to on it, Linux and what ever else is there

I was able to set up a custom graphical lilo boot menu using a bash script provided with Mandriva in /usr/share/bootsplash. I have not yet discovered how this can be done in grub. I always used the 640x480 resolution for the menu because it was easiest, and I did not need the screen real estate for the simple menu and background image I prefer. You can choose (and even create) a boot splash theme you prefer in MCC (System > Configuration > Configure your computer in the menu system).

Open MCC

Select Boot in the Category list (left).

Open the Select the graphical theme of the system while booting icon

Using the Graphical boot mode: drop down bar, choose whether the screen output is Verbose (you see the boot messages with the green OK or red Failed indicators), Text Only (never used this one, think it turns off any background image), or Silent (no boot messages, just the background with a progress bar of the length, width, and color of your choice).

Choose a graphical theme in the {B}Theme[/B] drop down bar. You can also choose to display the theme under the console (if the check box is checked, the background image will be displayed in the first console after boot). The background image for the selected theme will be displayed in the preview window to the right.

If you have an image you want to use for the graphical boot screen, press the Create new theme bar to create your own custom theme.

HTH,

Thanks, but I couldn't get it to work, I can go through and create a new theme, set the resolution, pick a picture and save the theme and every thing, but I can't select it from the Choose Theme drop down, the only thing available is the Mandriva Power Pack theme, both before and after I create and save my new theme.

After you create the theme and save it, you have to quit the theme creation tool, then you should be able to re-open Select the graphical theme while booting and select the theme you just created. If this is not the case, there is something wrong. I just created a 800x600 theme here, and it worked perfectly.

Well I got it to work on one of my machines, I had to create a new theme save it, exit, select create a new theme again, and then from the drop down box at the top of that page, select my theme, exit, then it was selectable on the first page. However on my other machine, no amount of saving, exiting, seem to help, I can go in to the create a new theme, select the theme from the drop down at the top, but it is never selectable on the first page. Oh well, at least I know a bit more than I did 2 days ago, Thanks for your help.