Will mandrivia recognise my ethernet/gpu etc

about to install but my worried incase it doesnt pick up alot of my devices.

edit: hard drive is completely formatted, no windows installed.

 

I have never once seen ethernet not work. Generally gpu's will at least work 2d.

Does your edit mean it worked fine, or you're on another computer?

 

ubuntu recognized everything off the bat on my laptop. Through some immediate updates it fixed a few device issues.

 

am on a different laptop. gonna wipe the disk clean and try install mandrivia

 

Good luck man. Linux is getting a lot better at being with the times. There's a much larger userbase these days, which means a lot more people to send in feedback. Dev's have started taking new users into account, rather than assuming the uber geek will be installing the OS. This also means there's a ton of other people who have done what you're doing now who can tell you how things went for them.

Let us know how it goes!

 

For both Mandriva 2008.1 and 2009.0 I had the problem that fairly early on in the installation process, the screen became all garbled and, well, entirely nonusable (until I rebooted - but it happened every time I tried to install). I think it's a graphics driver issue in the installation program, and it was suggested that I needed to start up some graphics environment before installing Mandriva. I have an nVIDIA 8600M GT GPU and the Santa Rosa chipset; perhaps you'll have better luck with your GPU.

Mandriva worked just fine in Virtual Box, however, and the ethernet, wireless, and GPU all set up effortlessly (although there was no 3D GPU in VirtualBox). I was running Virtual Box on an XP SP3 32-bit host, and Virtual Box and Mandriva seemed to mesh quite well.

As a note, based on my experience I recommend the lilo bootloader over GRUB; GRUB has been fairly unstable in my experience with Mandriva 2009.0 and Ubuntu 7.10. Overall it's got a good track record, but it's not something I'd advise gambling on. Though you should be okay if you leave an extra partition to re-install on in case anything does get corrupted.

But by all means, do post on how it turned out! I'd like to hear of Mandriva installing without problems, especially if you do have an nVIDIA GPU!

 

I've had no problems whatsoever with Mandriva 2008 and forward. I have an nVIDIA 8600M GT GPU and the Santa Rosa chipset also. Don't quite get that. I'd stick with GRUB too. So there's two different opinions

 

Did you have to set any special properties before trying to install? I was just trying to go right into the install program off the DVD I burned (which worked just fine in VirtualBox). If not, then I'm not sure what the problem was. Maybe DDR2 vs. DDR3 in the 8600M GT? I have the DDR2 version; I'm not sure which the Precision is but my guess is DDR3?

 

Apollo: I had Mandriva on my Asus C90s...no problems...it was ddr3, but I don't see how the ram speed would affect the driver. You can't compare to VB because it installs drivers for fake devices, just a layer. That vid card is really supported in almost all major distro's that I know of.
Problem I see with the average linux user switching to lilo from GRUB is that you can easily narf up your MBR with a dual boot machine..I know from experience...single boot as the OP, I guess it won't matter...but who cares about a bootloader? GRUB is more universally supported...I dunno...