Thanks in advance to all who respond! I am having a lot of difficulty getting KDE on Mandrake 9.0 to work with my Laptop. On install, I select KDE Desktop, etc... It then proceeds to do the install and all looks great and when it reboots to load into KDE, it hangs after 15 seconds. My suspicion is the Video card is incorrectly identified at 16MB instead of 4.... Any way to change this?? RedHat works OK... But I despise RedHat's distro... Help...Please.... Cheers! :)

If there is any output from the screen during boot, like errors, what are they? What exact model Dell do you have(Inspiron maybe?) What are the hardware specs like vid card(ATI Rage?), NIC (Actiontec EEPRO based 10/100?). Also what boot loader are you using, LILO or GRUB? The reason I ask is because the nics used in many dell laptops, the actiontec 10/100 ones, don't work to well and its very common for bootup to hang when initialising the nic. If you answer the questions above I may be able to help more.

Thanks for your reply! I should have added the specs... It's an Inspiron 2500 Actiontec 10/100 NIC w/modem Intel 815 Chipset/Video Pentium III 800 256MB RAM 10 Gig HD 15.1" Display 1024x780 I hope this helps... I have no clue as to what would be wrong... It loads linux ok, just an error at the APM load, then goes to start KDE... Get's a blue screen and the stopwatch and hangs after about 5 seconds... It appears that the Video Card is also registering at 16MB... I set it back to 4MB through XF86Config but it defaults right back to 16MB.... Cheers! :)

Being a Linux newbie am curious as to why you despise Redhat? Is it to do with the actual version of Linux or a company thing? Thanks, Neil.