After numerous disasters with Mandriva 2007 too many and too tedious to mention - just, avoid this if you have any alternative at all - I gave up and installed Etch.
You will all smile quietly and ask what took him so long.
Etch went in perfectly and with a minumum of fuss and started up Gnome. OK, I thought I will get kde and so on as well, for the sake of variety. So I now started up synaptic and installed fluxbox, fvwm and tried to install kde.
However, the other WMs don't work as expected.
fluxbox appears to start up with nothing at all. Right clicking does nothing, left clicking only brings up a fluxbox choice. There seems to be no way to start any application, including a configuration application or editor or terminal.
Then with kde there is something if possible more baffling. Synaptic declines to get kde on the grounds that it is missing kwebdev. It cannot find kwebdev if you search for it using synaptic. I googled kwebdev and it seems to be part of quanta. So I tried to install quanta, and did not seem to get quanta, but got a couple of libraries, but in any case, still no luck with kde.
Windowmaker works fine however.
Am I doing, or failing to do, something silly or obvious?
Peter