I just installed Mandrake 10.0 on a Compaq M300 notebook.
There were a couple of errors on install, but nothing terminal.

When the system starts up, X comes up, with a windows with 6 links on it. Behind that window is just a blue background. There are no signs of KDE, right and left clicks on the background do nothing.

I'm able to switch to the TTY w/ the cntrl-alt keys.

I'm not sure what's supposed to happen, but I was expecting some sort of window manager.

One of the packages that failed install was Perl-GTK. I thought that this could be causing the trouble, so I used the rpm installer to reinstall it from a different CD, and it installed. It didn't change the behavior.

Any insight?

"There were a couple of errors on install, but nothing terminal." <--- that is the problem.

Try a re-install.

You should not get errors.

Errors usually indicate that you will be missing key components.