I'm trying to configure Lilo to boot to WinXP first rather than Mandrake 10.1. I bring up Konsole and go to root and type in: /etc/lilo.conf but I get a Permission denied. I notice my root says root@localhost. Do I have to be Administrator to make the change? Thanks.

root is the super-user, and as super-user, root can make ANY change... so you shouldn't have to switch to any other user to configure lilo.

/etc/lilo.conf is a configuration file; it contains lilo's settings and nothing more. From your post, it sounds like you tried to run it (by just typing /etc/lilo.conf), and, since lilo.conf isn't, and shouldn't be, executable, the "Permission denied" error resulted from the executable permission bits not being set.

You need to edit the file, not run it. Some distributions come with a lilo configuration program that makes this process easier, but I'm not sure what that would be with Mandrake. If you have documentation, as is highly likely, I suggest you check it. Configuring lilo is something that would be there.

I'm starting to see why Linux hasn't replaced Windows yet. All this reminds me of the bad old days of DOS. Is there a distro of Linux that doesn't require any command line involvement?

Yeap, (kinda), it's called Mandrake and you're already using it

open Mandrake Control Center, type your root password to enter, click on boot, configure Boot Loader, and there you can configure you lilo settings

Regards

optionally,

shell$ vim /etc/lilo.conf

And also,
to install the boot loader.

Regarding the DOS comment, keep in mind that Windows has a hard time loading 2 OSes if it even does it at all. Anyhow, let us know if you were able to use the gui tool to modify the lilo.conf, I have never tried it. You could also try the Mandrake forum and google.