I randomly searched around the Internet and found a reference to a utility called aticonfig. I tried this as root, and got a _load_ of options. I tried
aticonfig –verbose –initial=dual-head
Which wrote me a new xorg.conf and backed up the old one. Restared X and the new monitor came up perfectly. I now have a dual head configuration.

The strange thing is that xrandr still doesn't know about the VGA and LDVS ports. Krandr seems to know about the second screen and will let me choose the resolution, but not in the expected way: it has a menu item at the top called Screen 2 where I can change resolution and Refresh Rate.

Glad to have got this solved, but still don't really understand it …

As you mention you're also having problems with wireless and bluetooth, maybe you should try booting with the noapic option. This has cleared up most of my Linux hardware problems in the past. Well try it at least once if you haven't already.

From Mandrake Control Centre (aka Configure your Computer), go to Boot > Configure your Boot. Open the Advanced pane, and uncheck the box by Enable APIC. Reboot. See if things are better or worse. You can re-enable it in the same way, or also by editing the grub command line.

you may want to try the intel driver x11-driver-video-intel-2.3.2-1mdv2008.1.i586.rpm which is available in the main/backport media.
You will be able to find Firefox 3 there too.

KDE — I understand there's nothing much you can do about what is included in that. OpenOffice is just a personal preference, and at the end of the day it isn't really much hassle to uninstall a couple of apps and replace them.

xrandr is a strange one. It usually works on my Thinkpad R50e, but not on my R51e, so I think there must be some odd hardware in here. Furthermore, on the R51e it hasn't worked with Ubuntu 7.10, PClinuxos 2007, Mandriva 2008, but *does* work when I boot off an Ubuntu 8.04 Live CD. Just haven't the time or inclination to re-install again right now. The fact that it works on one distro but not another indicates that its not a problem with xrandr or drivers per se, but a difference in how the distros handle the same hardware. If that makes sense.

The symptom is that whereas with the three distros which don't work, I only get one output identified (as identified by the xrandr command), which is "default". With Ubuntu, I get the "VGA" and "LVDS" outputs as advertised. Once these appear, then everything else works OK.

I tried the process outlined for the EEE PC, but that didn't work for me. So I guess the key for me would be identifying where Ubuntu's xrandr and Mandriva's xrandr are different.
Does that shed any light at all?

Frankly its not a deal breaker, but I just like to get things working!

On your negative points:

TrueCrypt – yeah, we cop to that. Honestly, there just aren't any maintainers with the time and expertise to update the package at the moment. We will try and get it done before 2009 comes out, though.

Skype and PulseAudio – that's a known issue, covered in the Errata: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Errata#No_sound_in_Skype . It affects all distros, as the problem is in how Skype uses ALSA (executive summary: badly).

KOffice – KOffice is officially part of KDE, so we include it in our default KDE install.

xrandr – if you have an Intel chipset you are likely to find this in all distributions. You need to make a single manual modification to xorg.conf to make it work. The basic procedure is documented here: http://wiki.mandriva.com/en/2008.1_Eee_External_Monitor – that's written specifically for the Eee, but you can generalize the instructions logically to apply to any system with an Intel adapter. The technical issue here is that the Intel driver is not yet capable of dynamic framebuffer allocation; meaning that you have to allocate enough memory for however big a display you want when X starts up (that's what you're actually doing by setting a Virtual line in xorg.conf , as the instructions lay out). By default the driver will allocate enough framebuffer space for the size of the largest display, which is why you can't use dual head.

The driver could default to 2048×2048 framebuffer, of course, or we distros could customize this. The downside of that is that it eats about 50MB of RAM, which is why we don't.

The driver developers tell me that dynamic framebuffer allocation (meaning that the framebuffer can simply be made bigger when you instruct xrandr to span to a second display, and all will work hunky-dory) should show up around the end of this year.

Thanks again for posting your impressions 🙂

Adam Williamson
Mandriva