Mandriva didn't last too long on the lappy. Poor lappy... You had F/OSS all going for you.  You had Mandriva working.  We were happy. But, wireless was flaky.  Wireless didn't want to connect regularly.  Wireless is the major reason why I have a laptop. Now, my poor lappy, you now have Windows XP.  I'm sorry Mandriva didn't work out.  I'm sorry I keep reinstalling things on you.  I'm sorry. But, I'm still running Ubuntu on the desktop.  We'll keep that going. Blogged with the Flock Browser

I now have Mandriva on my laptop. It was a long process that started on Monday this week.  I got home from work and decided that I wanted to dual-boot my laptop with Ubuntu and Windows.  Well, I put my Kubuntu disc into the DVD drive, and rebooted.  I told it to install, and it did... sort of.  I got impatient with the partitioner and I fubar'd my Windows install.  Yeah, it went away... totally. So I was Windows-less.  No big deal, I try to reinstall Kubuntu.  Well, I end up with a resolution of 600x800 (ugly) and no wireless.  I went "meh" and stated a download of Mandriva.  After that was downloaded, I installed that.  Wireless wasn't working, but I did have a 1024x768 resolution.  I decided that wasn't good enough and I quit for the evening. The next day (Tuesday) I stated again after work.  I had Mandriva on the computer, and I wasn't happy.  So, I went to Freespire.  Now, I had a brilliant amount of success with wireless (ie, it worked out of the box) but not with the resolution.  It was at 600x800.  So...  I was tired and went to bed after futzing with it for a couple hours. Wednesday, I started on my project again.  I decided to install vanilla Ubuntu.  No dice.  No wireless, no decent resolution... Frustration abounded.  I was talking to Brian and he suggested Fedora.  I found a decent Fedora download and got it.  I did the install, and had about the same results as before. Now, we go to Thursday night.  I was growing tired of the reinstalls and the non-working wireless and crappy resolution.  So, I decided to try Mandriva again.  I installed it, and started browsing the forums to figure out how to get wireless and the resolution working.  I figured out the resolution and got it set to 1280x768 the way I wanted it.  Wireless was a little more of an issue. I got the drivers I needed and started hacking around the gui for the wireless setup.  I got it all set up and lo and behold, WIRELESS WORKS!!! YAHOO!!! I'm quite happy with Mandriva.  It works on the laptop really well.  I haven't tried suspend/hibernate yet and I'll report back if/when it works. KDE was acting up for a little while, but once I turned off the effects (compiz-fusion) it worked like a charm.  Make sure you disable the desktop effects, at least initially, until you're sure it's going to work. If you have a laptop that you need to ditch Windows on (or you just want to try something new) give Mandriva a try.  I'm quite happy with it. Happy computing to all!