Close, but still no cigar

Linux is often proclaimed as the saviour of the benighted computeer. Moved to rightous anger by the beast of Redmond and the clear mastery of Linux, a mighty wave of Unix based systems will sweep away the evil empire of Microsoft and there will be much cheering throughout the galaxy.

Perhaps, but not just yet.

I am, it must be said, a friend of all things 'nix. I've earned a good living from the old bag of bolts for many years and consider myself to have some understanding of what's going on inside a running system. So, when I decided to recycle my wife's old LCD screen, by connecting it to my 'spare' PC, I didn't anticipate much in the way of trouble. Well, as Evelyn Waugh was wont to say, 'Up to a point, Lord Copper'.

I already had a couple of small Windows 2000 partitions on the disk, so I plugged the monitor into the spare socket of my old but perfectly serviceable Nvidia FX5500 and right clicked on the desktop. Select 'Properties', click the 'Settings' tab, pull down the 'Display' list and select 'use both monitors'; whereupon, I have to say, Robert was clearly your mother's brother. Total elapsed time: less than 5 minutes, including playing around with both monitors' settings, to get the best balance.

Ah, I thought, now let's put Linux on the unused disk space and build a twin head 'nix system. As I do a lot of work with Redhat servers, it seemed an obvious step to stick Centos 5.2, the free version of Redhat Enterprise Server, on the disk. This was not a success. As expected, Centos installed happily and soon I was looking at a KDE desktop. On one screen.

Nothing I could do would bring the second screen up as anything other than a psychadelic explosion in a neon tube factory. A few minutes searching turned up several comments, to the effect that the 'community' version of the Nvidia driver can't handle twin screens and you need to download Nvidia's own, proprietory, driver. So I did. It didn't. I could not get that driver to install, it just kept complaining that there was a problem with the installation and falling out.

All right, I thought to myself, we'll have another go. Out came the Madriva 2009 disk and 20 minutes or so later I was looking at, you guessed, one working monitor plus a piece of art guaranteed to get into the finals of the Turner Prize. Sigh.

So I rebooted, only to find that Grub had not got the message about the change in targets, even though Mandriva had claimed to have told it. So I had to boot from my Windows 2000 CD and invoke the recovery console, in order to invoke fixmbr. This is not your everyday DOS command but, when required, there's very little else that will do. So now I have to scrap the Linux partitions and start again.

Well, it's one way to use up a slow Friday.
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