🚀 go-pugleaf

G'day,
...as they say around these parts. How are you all?
Well I've been at it about a week...loading up Linux that is. Some
pretty late nights in there. However, I'm determined to make that
Microsoft break a little wider for the obvious technical and moral
reasons.

Ok..the story so far. Bought Mandrake Linux (enhanced Red hat the box
said), used the Partition Magic programme in Win 95, created
partitions and loaded up Linux. 

Great...I have the bash shell...and there my friends it stops. Now, I
think this is pretty common but my monitor doesn't want to perform
when it comes to the KDE desktop.

Some specs

MONITOR

Make VISAGE
Model 105ED
B'width 65 MHz
H/Freq 30-54
V/Freq 50-120

Has anyone one of these...??

Motherboard Pentium ASUS SP97-V
with SiS 5598 integrated VGA (4MB) on board

Clock frequency set at 60MHz.....higher or lower blanks the monitor
post bios boot.

Anyway..it all works great except for the XWindows /KDE etc.

I get a blue screen, the silhouttes of Icons in white. The text boxes
just have black spaces. It operates..i.e I can guess where the login
screed is and where the get out button is. Screen is pretty curved.

Anyway, so after fiddling in Xconfigurator and XF86config....still no
joy. So I found out about XFree86. It was on a disc supplementary to
my installation disc. I succeeded copying the RPM package to a
directory on my hard drive. The text was in red..is this significant.
I installed it with the "rpm -i <package> syntax. My hard drive
whirred a bit and returned me to the bash shell. But....I can find the
files nowhere...typing X <tab> just brings up the usual
files...xconfig etc.....

With the XFree86 Howto as an assistant I determined Horizontal and
Vertical timings for my monitor hoping to plug them in manually to
Xfree if the VGA16 GUI didn't work. But seeing as I can't seem to
install the package..I'm stuck.....

Anyone got any ideas

1) What am I doing wrong with handling the packages, 2) Is it me or
are monitor problems a common occurrence? 3) Anyone now how I can get
the timings I've calculated into a (?) config file. 4) Am I mistaken
in trying to use XFree86..??

I eagerly await any thoughts you may have on this....

in Anticipation..thanking you,

John