I just installed Mandrade 9.1 on a older hp pavillion. It is dual bootable with XP. Everything seemed to go well with the installation after the updates it said installation sucessful and said reboot so I clicked reboot. All the items come up with a green ok. It launched a first time setup wizard. I chose KDE as a theme and set up my email info. After the wizard compleated the screen eventually changed to blue with a couple of waves in it. Then it just sits there. Occoasionally I see a window open and quickly close and sometimes I actually see the tool bar but it immideatly disappears and is replace by the watch on the screen. I have let it sit there for over an hour and a desktop screen never comes up. I can move the mouse around the screen and the dual boot works fine because I can still get to XP. Does anyone know what my problem could be. Also for some reason I had to use the text version of the installer because all the graphical ones just made my screen go black. I can get into the command line by going to the fail safe it puts me in single user mode ( what ever that is) is there any hope of this ever working? what should I do. Keep in mind I am a compleate NEWBIE to Linux and have no idea what to do in the command line stuff.

Since you have installed have you ran XF86Config? Try holding down control-alt-f2. Log in as yourself. After that type in "XF86Config" (without the quotes). This is a tool to help you set up your X (graphical) server. It is in command line but everything is explained. If it wan't you to look through types of monitors hitting enter scrolls through until you find yours, or a generic and by that monitor name there is a number, type it in and hit enter. If you have any questions there just post them here. Next once it has asked you to save it you type y and hit enter. Type in "startx - :1" (w/o quotes). That brings up another X server and you are now in control-alt-f8. Now that might work. If that doesn't work go to control-alt-f3. This time log in as root. type in "cd /etc/X11" then when your are there type "dir" this will list what is in the directory. You should see a file called XF86config-4. What you need to do now is take it out of that file but not delete it. "mv /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /home/(insert your user name)" Now you might need to move that back later but not yet. Now type in "startx -- :2" and see if that helps.
Hope this works for you,

In Mandrake, the program you need isn't XF86Config, it's called XFdrake, and you must run it as root.

Let me know how you make out, I'm having identical installation problems. I choose Mandrake for it's user friendliness, but may now try Red Hat to see if these problems persist.

Let me thank all of you for repling to my post. I ran the X86Config and saved it but after saving it the was a message that stated that it must be in the etc/X11 folder where the system was searching for it to take effect. So I moved it to the etc/X11 folder overwriting the X86Config that was there.I never saw a file in the dir named X86Config-4 so I could not do that step. Now the system just goes straight into command line when it comes up. What should I do now. Run XFDrake? relaod?

Run XFdrake

FYI: I've never had that problem but then I always quit out of the wizard as it doesn't seem to do anything vital. The default desktop works fine, so if you do have to reinstall, try not using that wizard.