Hi folks,
I would like to say a big hello to you all. I have been a Linux user now for ...well four hours, and in that time I have installed Mandrake successfully on to my old computer. Made lunch and taken the wife shopping. Oh ...er and I forgot, I seem have got myself stuck in too linux loading into shellscript mode instead of the nice desktop that I customised as well. Every time I reboot, the shellscript is there and I cant for the life of me find my way back to the desktop and it's nice and easy GUI. Tried searching the net (windows on my other machine), but nothing.
Can any experienced Linux user put me right.

Thanks in advance.
Tam.

log in and be sure you can run in X again by typing startx or init 5. If GUI starts, proceed with this below:

as root, open a treminal and

look for line that says id:3:initdefault: press i to change to insert mode, change the 3 to a 5, hit ESC, :wq and press enter to write and quit. If you screw up, hit ESC, :q! and press enter to quit without writing. This sets startup mode to 5, graphical. Reboot to make sure it starts correctly.

Once you are in GUI, there are GUI tools to do the above functions, but it's been a while since I looked at Mandrake so I don't recall them offhand.

login as normal user, then
$xwmconfig
allows you choosing your favourite desktop env. then
$startx
at this point you should be after.
If everything works fine, waiting for some time in order to make sure everything is properly configured before any further modification is a good rule of thumb.
To keep this configuration you have to edit your etc/inittab modifying the default runlevel
from 3 to 5 at line
id:3:initdefault:
As I'm not sure 5 is the correct runlevel leading you to garphical interface on mandrake, I strongly suggest you check first your /etc/inittab where you can usually find useful infos.
There should be a grafical tool you can start from command line called drakconf on similar as well to do such things, but I do not have details.

Ciao

oops, you probably already get a response
Ciao

Thanks guys, crisis over, until the next one!!

Where did I go wrong? Well I was curious about the 'other' options I got the option of booting into apart from Linux and Windows (running win98 on this machine as well. I chose the failsafe option. Ofcourse it opens when loaded a shellscript. Everytime I rebooted the system with the command reboot...since I am the only user...it never prompted for login and booted straight back to 'failsafe'. Finally sorted out by the command logout and then noticed that the login load option was set for 'failsafe' so changed back to KDE. Okay now. There endeth my first lesson.

See I am going to have fun with Linux. Anyone know of any good linux newbie tutorial sites, and any good newbie (complete) linux books.

Thanks guys for your suggestions. I will be back, and hopefully in the not to distant future I will be just as 'helpful to others as you were with myself.

Thanks again,
Tam

Don't know about any good books but here are some useful websites:

Security
Security II
Some Useful Linux Commands
Useful Linux Commands
Advanced Perl
Beginning Perl
BASH Programming
Advanced BASH Scripting Guide
HOW-TOs
General Documentation
Projects, Packages and other cool stuff

Thanks theOther1, will keep me busy for a while.

go here,
http://www.tldp.org/guides.html
http://www.icon.co.za/~psheer/book/index.html.gz
Ciao