Option: boot from CD Alienware X51 - i7 - 8Gb - nVidia GTX 555
After all the preliminaries this came up with a display squashed into the left half of the screen with three colours out of registration making the tiny text almost illegible. Obviously a driver problem. I would have expected it to try the VESA driver which worked fine under Mageia 1. GNOME 3 failed to load - the message was something like "your hardware is not capable of delivering the Gnome 3 experience". I had to abandon it. Dell Inspiron 580 - i3 - 4Gb - nVidia GeForce 310 This is my production machine. The system started to boot and seemed to be getting ready to switch to the gui and reported "the driver has changed" and ejected the CD and asked me to reboot. End of story. So it looks like I cannot even test it. I have no experience of live CDs so maybe there is a way to make it work. For instance, in the second experiment I tried pressing F5 before booting because there was a menu with the item "F5 : driver" but all that did was move the selection down to "Install from CD".
