I recently installed Mandrake8 on an old laptop I have. A Compaq Presario 1275. I followed the steps for installing and for some reason I did not get the choice to use GUI or console login. It goes straight to the console login. And that is where I am stuck. I was hoping that someone could shed some light on a newbie who wishes to drop msft for linux.

To get into your GUI:

'startx'

To make it boot into a GUI on default:

You could edit /etc/inittab in order to make it log into X, rather than multi-user. Look at the top of the file (you have to be superuser to edit it, use vi or emacs). This is what a section of mine looks like:

# Default runlevel. The runlevels used by RHS are:
# 0 - halt (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
# 1 - Single user mode
# 2 - Multiuser, without NFS (The same as 3, if you do not have networking)
# 3 - Full multiuser mode
# 4 - unused
# 5 - X11
# 6 - reboot (Do NOT set initdefault to this)
#
id:3:initdefault:

Note the line at the bottom, you will want to change the number corresponding with "multi-user" to the number corresponding with "X11". In my case, I would change 3 to 5. Save it and reboot your system (/sbin/shutdown -r now). Good luck!