I've got a copy of Mandrake 10 but i've never used it. I would like to install this alongside my XP (i don't know how to do this really, i'm a Linux novice) but first, I've been messing around with it on Virtual PC. One thing that's bugging me, is that I can't get sound OR the net working on there. I connect to the internet through a router, and had the impression that Mandrake would just pick up the settings, as I had read elsewhere, but this does not seem to be the case. I'd like to get sound and network working in the Virtual Machine so I can see what the system is like in full. Can anyone help me out? While i'm here, I have an Asus A8N-SLI deluxe motherboard (nForce4) with an AMD 64 CPU - would Linux just install on here, and all devices working? Or do I need chipset drivers and the like? Thanks for any info on either of these matters. Alex

Chances are that your network will work just fine and so will your sound (depending on what card it is). If it's built into the motherboard then you should be laughing. Rather than trying to get it working under a virtual machine (whihc degrades performance) why not try a live cd? Mandiva (foramlly mandrake) do live version of their distro called mandiva move which boots straight from the CD with no installation required, The performance is still not as good a a hard drive install due to cdrom access times but the hardware detection should work. http://www.computing.net/linux/wwwboard/forum/28617.html ftp://fr2.rpmfind.net/linux/Mandrake/iso/move/2.0/i586/Mandrakelinux-Move.i586.iso

Thanks for the info. While I like the idea of actually installing Linux (it looks very good!) I'll give that live cd a try. I assume that that is the link to it at the very bottom of your post? :)

Well, I downloaded it and burnt it to a disc. The problem is, although it boots from the CD and the installer starts, I get "NO CDROM DEVICE FOUND" - which I find hard to believe as it's just booted from it! If i remember rightly, this happened on this machine once before. It then asks me to insert the driver floppy, or something like that, which I don't have. I'm confused here! Any ideas? Thanks, Alex

What sort of CDROM do you have? Perhaps you could try Knoppix instead. The hardware detection is very good and they has just released version 4, mandrake move is getting a little old now (the company Mandrake have even changed name to Mandiva and brought out newer distros since it was released!) http://www.knoppix.net/

Thanks for getting back to me. I have an LG DVD-ROM drive and another, AOPEN CD-RW/DVD-ROM combo drive. I've tried booting from both but get the same error. As for Knoppix, I downloaded this last night and burnt it to a CD this morning...only to find the ISO is over 700MB so how can I fit this onto a CD-R disc? I did attempt to burn it to a 700Mb CD-R and although it worked, it fails to load up properly during the boot process. Thanks again for any info! Alex

Actually just read the FAQ and it looks like I might have burnt it at too fast a speed. That'll teach me