Hi, guys, recently i installed mandrake onto my t30 with winxp installed already, it is very handy to install, since mandrake almost does everything for me, after the installation, i reboot the machine i get promopted a screen of five options: linux-smp, linux, linux-nonfb, failsafe, windows. first question, can someone please what they mean exactly, the windows led me to xp but how about the others, second questions, i waited for 10 secs, and by default it takes me to linux, i logged in, and type startx on the line to start linux interface, that is when i get this error message:
"XIO : fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on server "'0.0" after 0 requests (0 known processed with 0 events remaining)"

by the way, my laptop worked fine when had a dual boot xp and slackware.

can someone please help? i really appreciate it

linux-smp = Boot the multiprocessor capable kernel. Use this on a dual CPU machine (Or a HTT P4)
linux = same as linux-smp but for uniprocessor systems
linux-nonfb = don't load the framebuffer for the cuddly boot screen
failsafe = trys to be failsafe. Probably isn't.
windows = path to the blue screen.

No idea on the X error. It's a fairly generic one though. Try dropping it into google.

google is your buddy on things like the x failure. just out of curiosity....what video card do you have? on my wife's inspiron 5150 she had the geforce fx 5200 and we had to load the vesa drivers on the install to have x and then go get the nvidia drivers and install them then alter the xf86config-4 file to get x working on both the regular and smp kernels (and then switching back and forth required reinstalling the nvidia driver everytime).

if the install left you with the smp boot option, you probably have the proper processor to do the smp kernel. you probably want to do this unless there are reasons (beyong my knowledge) not to do so. this is nice esp. if you do scientific processing of any kind.

That's not necessarily true. I've got several uniproc boxes that the installer puts a SMP kernel on. It doesn't generally cause you any problems to run an SMP kernel on a uniproc box, but it doesn't gain you anything either.