hmm, Thanks for the suggestions. didn't seem to do the trick though. When I installed mandrake, i did select intel 845 (which i think is what i have). I tried vesa, and that didn't seem to help. Another thing that i didn't notice before. when I boot up, it gives me this error: PCI: Device 00:1f.1 not available because of resource collisions Could that be the video card?? (if you can't tell, i'm not much of a hardware guy). any help would be appreciated. Also -- should I try another distribution? Say Red Hat? Jonathon >First off, I am not sure what the "Mandrake-way" to do things is. >I think that you need to find out what the video chipset is. Its >quite possible that the video chipset is the Intel 845g chipset. >I have the i845g in my Compaq workstation, and its not yet >completely supported in X (or in the kernel for some of the other >functions). You should be able to get it to work using VESA >compatability mode. If you use a GUI to configure X, set the >driver to "vesa". Or if you edit /etc/X11/XF86Config[-4] >directly, try puttting the line: > Driver "vesa" >under Section "Device" . > > > >