Hi. I just recently downloaded the Mandrake 10 ISOs, burnt them to CD and set it all up dual-booting with Windows XP thanks to LILO.

Apart from a slight glitch after the installation procedure, first time I booted into Windows, it ran chkdsk and all worked fine. I then rebooted into Mandrake, but had some small problems. I noticed the system was very unstable, and some very easy procedures like playing a .mpg file in Totem (That's supposed to be possible right?) wouldn't work. Also, despite all my file systems (Windows partition, DVD Drive, CD-RW Drive, Removable USB Storage etc.) being detected and mounted, no icons were displayed on my desktop, and no matter how hard I tried, I couldn't change my desktop background. After freezing while attempting to load TuxRacer (That'll teach me for not configuring my graphics card!), I had to flick it off at the plug.

Now whenever I load into Mandrake, I get the checking thing where it goes through the list of all those things. The only one that fails is eth0, which doesn't matter to me because I don't use my ethernet connection. I get a very brief message right at the end about something not being able to loopback (It's litteraly there for a second and gone in a flash, so I can't quite catch what it says), then KDE starts loading. It gets through all the stages, then hangs on 'Recovering session' for a while, before I'm presented with a blank blue screen.

I'm a complete Linux newbie, so would really appreciate some advice in plain english!

System Specs...

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53ghz)
512mb PC2100 DDR (2x256mb)
1x 54gb Maxtor 7200rpm HDD (Windows takes 30, mandrake takes 6/7 and the rest is free)

Windows XP SP1
Mandrake 10 Official

Probably the easiest thing, as you have only just installed the system, would be a re-install - choose upgrade when prompted.

It sounds like you are running the "root" desktop. You should set up a user, other than root, and be in that user all of the time. You can switch to root easily when needed.

What kind of video card do you have? It's not listed in your specs. Reinstalling can indeed be done, but this is linux, not windows! Usually the fixes are pretty simple once the problem is figured out.

While I mostly agree with you txthusdan, I thoroughly endorse streeters' recommendation.

Going the dummy "upgrade" path is a quick and easy way to get things set up properly again. About 20mins and it's over instead of spending hours looking for solutions to what is probably a one off problem resulting from a slightly incorrect install.

uberpenguin will have plenty of other more important things to learn in time.



Cheers. John.

Sorry I forgot to include my Graphics Card Specs. It's a Sapphire Radeon 9600XT (Fireblade Edition). When installing mandrake, I had to set it up as a Generic Radeon card, which is hopefully the right thing.

I'll have a go at re-installing now, and if that still refuses to work, I have a nice Suse DVD to try out!

Radeon cards are problematic because ATI is a little off in their linux support. It's too bad, because they are a great video card, but are sort of windex trapped. Aussiejohn, if any user is running the root desktop, they can re-install for a month and still not resolve the issue of the deliberate reduction of function by kde of the root desktop. That's right, kde deliberately reduces function so that one knows they are running as root, which is very noobie dangerous.

Summary, you should create a non-root user, regardless of the distro. The generic ATI drivers will work, but not 3-d. Again, reinstalling is a windex thingy and is not always the best answer in linux. As in this case, I don't think we are dealing with an installation issue; it's a user issue.

Ixthusdan. You may be right. But I DID NOT say that my suggestion is 100% the answer. I did say that MOSTLY (85% of the time) it did solve things and when it did not then I went looking for other solutions so the idea is still the quickest to start off with.

Although I started off with Win98 then went to Win2000, I never new anything about the Repair procedure in W2000 until recent times and I have been doing the dummy "upgrade" concept for at least 2yrs now. I have NEVER tried the upgrade idea in w2000 to fix problems because the repair routine either worked or if it didn't ( majority of times) it meant do a clean reinstall.

When I was trained as an Air Force Apprentice Radio and Radar Technician, we were taught that one should try ALL the simplest possible remedies before trying the more difficult ones.
What is it with computer enthusiests today that you all have to look for the most difficult routines to solve a problem??? Has to be fixed via the command line !!! Using the GUI is too simple so it cannot be as good !!! Just doing a random look over this very MUB (absolutely the best in the internet world) will show that the majority of the solutions to problems were simple and ultimately done via the GUI as in MCC or KCC.
e.g. Computer does not start. Young Technician checked everything in the power supply and the switching and took 5 hrs so called me. The actual solution...........the wall power plug was not plugged in and switched on. My time 5mins Think I am joking..???? I am not. The good thing that came out of that was that young Tech never forgot that lesson and became the best of all the Techs with the lowest service times of all of them. Good for everyone.

Sorry for maybe being a little offtopic but I felt it was relevant here as in many other places and discussions.

Cheers. John.

Thanks for the help. I reinstalled, and this time chose some different settings (Like not automatically logging in etc.)

I can now log in using Gnome and other Window Managers perfectly, but KDE is still refusing to budge. I'm fine like this for the moment, to get to know Linux, but having KDE not working is annoying. Maybe I'll try waiting for the next Mandrake release and see if that works nicely...

Now you have a working system, pop along to easyurpmi
Follow the instructions there, and then update your installation with mandrake update or "urpmi --auto-select" - you may find this fixes the problem.

You should do the updates anyway for security reasons.

Chris

I agree with streeter. There is NO point in waiting for the next release of Mandrake. What exacttly makes you think there is anything wrong with Mandrake as it is ???.
I cannot follow your thinking on this.
I am using KDE all the time and I never had a problem installing or using it.

You are having a problem WITH YOUR OWN INSTALL OF KDE so waiting for the next version of Mandrake is not going to fix that, unless you happen to do your installation slightly different than the way you did it this time.

Have you tried doing a "DUMMY upgrade" by inserting the #1 cdrom and rebooting and follow the upgrade procedure ??? More often than not, this little trick sorts out a lot of such problems. If you haven't tried it then you have nothing to lose by trying it. If it does not work then you are no worse off.

Cheers. John.

you might want to check this out... im having the same problem.

http://www.linuxquestions.org/questions/sh...threadid=188246