hello. I recently installed freebsd 5.2.1. I installed it without any problems. When I rebooted however, I was brought to a black screen with login near the bottom. So I logged in with the user account i created during the installation. It looked like it was starting to boot, because there was a bunch of text that was running across the screen, but then it stopped and i was left with the same black screen with a "$" and kde didn't boot! I'm confused. Am i supposed to enter a command when the "$" appears. What am i doing wrong/ not doing. Please help.

To start an X session, enter "startx", or startkde or startgnome. If you want to be in the graphical enviroment every time, you want to change your run level. A file called "inittab" in the /etc dir should have these settings. There should be a line looking something like:
id:5:initdefault
The 5 is the run level, on fedora core 2, its 5. There should be an explanation of the run levels in the file, if not get a working boot disk setup and experiment with different run levels. (You might not want to set it to 6 or 0, as that very well may be the reboot or halt runlevel.) If your not sure, like I said, make sure you have an emergency disk to change the runlevel should something go wrong. (Don't worry, setting the run level to anything shouldnt, most likely, do any long term harm).

Uhm, the initlevels is a Linux thing.

The easiest way to make sure the xwindow manager starts is to edit /etc/ttys:
Here is an example of the lines you want to look for in the file. The second to last line (ttyv8) is going to be off in the default install. Just turn it to on once you are sure X is configured and working properly. The last line is an example of how you would use kdm instead of xdm if you wanted to -- you can do the same thing for gdm. Everything in the file that starts with a # is a comment. Just FYI.

Make sure X is condigured and working before you change this. startx will run it. If it crashes or doesn't start you should run xf86cfg and change the settings.