Some problems with optiplex 745

[Velenik Yvan]

Hello everyone.

I am using an Optiplex 745 (with an ATI X1300 256Mb video card), on 
which I installed an x86_64 version of Mandriva Linux 2007. It works 
reasonably OK, but there are still a few annoying issues.

1) The boot process sometimes (actually pretty often, but quite 
randomly) stops. It does so before having mounted the filesystem, so I 
don't have any logfile to tell me what went wrong. Apparently it happens 
either when checking the filesystem (resiserfs, but I had the same issue 
with other ones), or mounting it. Surprisingly, this does not happen 
with other linux distributions I tried on the same machine...
2) The 3D acceleration fails (and that happens on all the linux 
distributions I tried). First, the mtrr is completely screwed up (cat 
/proc/mtrr reports 64Gb of base memory, or something like that - I have 
only 1Gb, of course). I found some informations on similar issues on the 
web, and applied the techniques suggested (basically using a script that 
reinitializes the mtrr properly at boot time).  This  might, or might 
not, be related with the main issue, which is that , even though the 
Xorg log file reports that direct rendering is enabled and everything is 
fine, launching a 3d application (say, glxgears, for example), results 
in either a black window, or a window with fixed garbage. I am using the 
latest (and tried several other recent versions of the) driver from ATI 
website.

I would be very interested to know whether anyone of you has succeeded 
in installing (any version of) linux on this machine, without meeting 
the two problems described above, or has encountered similar problems 
(on the same or other machine/linux distribution).

Of course, any suggestions to correct these problems would be even better.

Best regards,
Yvan