Installing Mandrake 10.0 - Video freezes up

[Windwood]

I'm in the process of installing 10.0, clean on an old Dell XPS 300 to which I've upgraded memory to 384MEG. I got to the point where I'm asked for video driver (Diamond 1000) and screen resolution. I select somewhere around 860 X 1120 or so as I have no clue what to put in here. The install program asks if I want to test it & I hit "OK" . The monitor goes blank and comes back with the little "x" icon. I wait, and wait, and wait but nothing happens. After about 5 minutes I try the mouse and I can move the cursor around but no key stroke combo I use will free up the screen. The only thing I can think is that the res I selected was too small & froze the system up???

Do I have to kill the install and start over? I could see going through it all again with the same result! That would make me a little testy.

Anybody got a clue?

BTW the install CDs are a set of 4 from Linux Central, the "Official Mandrake 10.0"

Thanks for any help. Maybe it's a program bug?

[drakebasher]

It might be a bug. Mandrake 9.2 seems not to be able to configure video at all automatically. Re-install may not help. To get out of the blank screen, enter ctrl-alt-backspace to kill X. Or you should be able to get a text screen with ctrl-alt-F5 (or F4, F3, etc). Then you can run the configuration program and then check/edit before restarting X. Read the manual page for XF86Config:

man XF86Config

and then run

XFree86  -configure

As for screen resolution, correct values are 1024x768 for fairly high resolution and 800x600 for a lower resolution that works on nearly all monitors. If you're having problems, it's best to use lower resolutions and fewer colors to get things started, and then improve performance from there.