[SOLVED] I hope I'm not duplicating....

[wolfton]

...but I searched as long as I could tolerate.

I have installed Mandriva 2008.0 on my HP Pavillion TX 1410 US tablet PC.

I installed all of the desktop environments available on the DVD, and now I have a problem with KDE. KDE was working, and I had it set up to only four virtual desktops (default). But my dektop pager now shows 9 windows. Additionally, have a grid of nine windows in the lower right hand corner of my screen that allows me to snap to nine virtual desktops by left clicking, or I can right click and move my viewable area anywhere in the grid, even on the lines. It actually looks like my screen resolution is somehow set extremely high, and this is a navigation pane.

I tried to change my multiple desktops to only three, but I ended up with 27. I went down to one and now I am back to only nine in the pager.

i would really like some assistance if anyone has the time and the know-how.

[daik]

This sounds very odd, I am not a KDE user, but lets try to solve this anyway. First what resolution are you running?
It sounds like you have a virtual desktop size much larger than your screen resolution. I have a faint memory of doing this a few years ago, so hopefully this will come back to me during our problem solving.

[wolfton]

As soon as I posted, I decided to try and figure it out on my own. I right-clicked the desktop and tried to configure resolution. It was set to 1280x1024 so I changed it back to 1024x768. I still had the problem, so I went to the Control enter.

So then I went to the Control Center and then the application for configuring 3D. I had Metisse selected. I selected No 3D effects, and now I have my normal screen. Evidently, I had accidentally turned on a 3d effect that doesn't perform well on my laptop.

So i was able to clean this self-inflicted wound up, but I did notice that I am using the incorrect driver for my video card. i have the nVidia GeForce Go 6150. My computer is using the 8800 driver. I wonder if the proper driver would have allowed me to use Metisse the way it was designed to be used.

[daik]

The driver question is a good one. nVidia often pride themselves with having a 'unified driver architecure' so in theory that should not be a problem. Reality is of course totally different. Are you running nVidia's driver or the free (open source) driver? I find that nVidia's drivers in general are very good, and quite easy to install, so if you are not running their driver hop over to nvidias website and have a read of the instructions and install the driver.

[wolfton]

Well, the problem is solved, but not the way I expected to. Unfortunately, I can't edit the title to say "solved".

Its true, the "latest" driver was the correct driver. I decided to go back to PC LinuxOS though, because I finally got around to trying MiniMe2008.

I'll always love Mandriva, and I plan to keep Powerpack 2008 around, mostly now because of LinDVD, but I will now stick to PCLOS as my main distro. thank you.

[oz]

Well, the problem is solved, but not the way I expected to. Unfortunately, I can't edit the title to say "solved".

You can mark the thread as solved by clicking on "thread tools" link right above your first post. There's a "mark this thread as solved" option there. It's a new feature that was recently added to the board.