help me
 

i have installed mandrake 9.1 on my computer. i have windows 2000 professional running on c drive on ntfs(7.0gb) and
mandrake on ext3 (6.5gb partition)(samsung 80gb,7200rpm, partition was created with acronis partition expert, both my c drive and linux ext3 are primary partitions; the same configuration works very well if i install red hat 9).
ram is 392mb
celeron 600mhz
810e motherboard from intel
48cd writer from lg.
the installation is very smooth. but after rebooting the following message appears
"local host login"
password.

i am new to linux. i dont understand what that means.
then i tried redhat 9(shrike). the installation is very smooth and it didnt ask any local host login although it appeared on the screen for few seconds.
why this difference between the two distributions?
all the reviews says that mandrake is user friendly but i could not use it at least once. please help me in installing mandrake on my machine

thank you for your time
chittico

It would appear that Mandrake didn't have X fully set up. There are 2 reasons that I can think of for this - the first is that you didn't set it up during the install (or a desktop), which would be unlikely. The second is that Mandrake is not compatible with your video card - it doesn't have any compatible drivers. Different distributions will, mostly, see the same hardware and set it up, but there are variations in this.

What type of video card do you have? Name, etc

What version of Mandrake do you use?

You didn't, per chance, uncheck graphical login during installation of your system?

local host is your machine
login means it wants you to input your user name, which you should have generated during the install. if you are not aware of this, use root for the time being.
password is the secret key that unlocks the computer, it corresponds to your user name. you would have told it a password at some stage during the install.

if you have to use root to login, find out about adding a user, and using that account.

why do distributions differ?
In short (i'll try to keep it short anyway), they are aimed at different people, markets, or businesses. For instance, Lindows is aimed at people that are still in windows rehab, who can't let go of the look and feel completely. Lycorice is in a similar boat. Mandrake is more of a newbie distro than Red Hat, it provides alot of good wizards and such. Red Hat is a curse upon the linux world, though they have gotten alot better since version 7.0. (7.2 is the one i most dread). SuSE leans more to wards european things, is more complete and a better all rounder than say ... Red Hat, which is why SuSE comes on as many disks. Debian is more of a purist distro, it contains only free software. Gentoo is a coders linux, everything is compiled from source for your system. That is great, but it can get complex. Slackware is sorta inbetween Debian and Gentoo, very pure, often relying on source code, but not as complex as Gentoo. The last three generally are considered a little more advanced than Mandrake or Red Hat, which in turn are considered more advanced than Lindows.

thank you very much for all your inputs.
i tried mandrak 9.2rc2 (sept 9th 2003 version), when i used graphical mode it gave the same problem of local host login and password.
then i tried expert mode - the problem remained.
then i tried textmode installation. i did everything the same for the two other modes (graphical and expert modes) but surprisingly this time it didnt stop at local host login and it went ahead and i could go into the kde environment successfully. so would you advice a text based installation everytime for all distros. if so let me know.
in the kbe environment it doest show the hard disc(hda3 in my case) like in windows(my computer, explore, disc space remaining etc).
is there a disc defragmentor available in linux environment like in windows.
thanks again to all of you.

sir
i used mandrake 9.1 downloaded from linuiso.org.
i didnt unchek graphical login during installtion.
thanks

video card
 

sir
i dont have a separate video card its an on board video available on 810based mother board from intel.

Glad to hear that you could solve your problems :D.

I never heard of a defragmentation tool, I seem to remember, that this is not so much of a problem under linux. Maybe its depending from the file system you use.

I believe that ext2 and 3 don't need defragging. Regardless, Linux gets far less fragged than Windows and should last much longer.

Interesting about your video card - I have a similar one in this laptop and have never had problems installing any distro (except Debian).