hi guys, i'm running Mandrake 10 on a P4 box (Dell OptiPlex), with IBM L170 flat panel and a GeForce4 MX440 card. I'm using 1280x1024 at 72 hz. The weird thing is that the text are kindda blurry on the monitor, esp in web browser (either FireFox or Konqueror) or bold types. I've downloaded and installed the latest nVidia drive but it didn't seem to matter. What could be wrong? I used to run Mandrake 9.0 on a PIII dual CPU box with a 20 inch CRT monitor (Iyyama Pro 510), which displays beautiful and sharp text and images. I know a flat panel might not be great for pictures, but the text look very sharp and clean on this machine when I boot it to Win XP.

(yeah it's a dual boot; I may write a post on how I got it work on this pathetic Dell box: I bet Michael Dell is married to Gates, or at least is sucking up his behind or sth, the way he made the Dell machines so integrated with Windowz that this sucker boots to the WinXP HD even if it's a slave and the Linux partition is on the MASTER HD and Grub was supposed to have written to the MBR about what to boot! well that's a totally different story and i should concentrate on the one at hand, right? )

anyho, another annoyance is the OpenOffice. that piece of crap has crashed/forzen a number of times already, simply dealing with some spread sheets from tabulated text files (small ones, even). Has anyone any suggestions on how to fix it? Thanks in advance.

jiong

Did you install the right font package?
There are at least two, maybe even three font packages for Mandy, but the one that normally gets installed is fonts at 75dpi. There should be a font pack for fonts at 100dpi for higher res monitors. Maybe try installing this and see if it makes any difference. The extra font packages should be on your CD's so you don't need to download them.

Check the driver for your monitor is set to the correct synch frequencies (horizontal and vertical) for your monitor - or find a driver as close to the required synch frequencies as possible.

Dell monitors are a nightmare to set up on Linux sometimes. I have a Samsung XIOD monitor (only says XIOD, not Samsung, they were obviously not willing to stand behind their product!) for which Linux hasn't got a driver. However, one of the Samsung drivers had the required synch frequencies and thus works fine.

As far as OpenOffice is concerned - you might want to download the newest version and update your installation.

Terri