I am a newbie to Linux and have recently installed Mandrake 9.2 on a free portion of my hard drive. I am also running Windows XP Pro.

After I installed Linux, the system rebooted fine and cam to the graphical boot screen and I let it start with the default mode. After going through what I think were a series of tests, a screen came up asking me to login so I did.

I entered my login name which is chris.

Then text came up saying [chris@localhost chris]$

After trying various commands to no avail I restarted the sytem and tried again with the same outcome. So I continued trying all of the other boot opions and they have all done the same thing.

If anyone could help me resolve this issue and get Linux running, it would be greatly appreciated.

Thank you, Chris

You are logged in. To start the GUI, type startx at the $ prompt.

Thanks, I will go try that now.

Chris,

Ok, when I type startx ant [chris@localhost chris]$ it loads a new page with a bunch of stuff then says,

XIO: fatal IO error 104 (connection reset by peer) on X server ":0.0" after 0 requests ...

and it goes on for about another line.

If anyone can please tell me what to do here, I would appreciate it.

Thanks Chris

If you still have problems you might want to consider reinstalling. The initial setup dialogs allow you to configure and test your video/monitor, which is a lot easier that editing the XFree config file manually. There are also options that allow you to boot straight into the GUI (runlevel 5) and it'll even log you in automatically. Anyway, either you're booting runlevel 3 (text console) or the video is configured incorrectly and X is kicking you out. Both problems would probably be easier for a newbie to fix by reinstalling. Otherwise you'll need a crash course in using the vi text editor (an ancient pain in the arse prog UNIX zealots can't seem to discard).

I re-installed but have gotten back to the same screen

Does startx still fail with that error?
If you know some basics about your monitor and graphics card (make, horizontal & vertical refresh rates) you could always try running
xf86config
as root. It's a text-based way of configuring your X system. Follow the instructions and you can redo it as many times as you like if you make a mistake.
This writes a file called XF86Config
After that I would do the following commands:
[root@localhost chris]# mv /etc/X11/XF86Config-4 /etc/X11/XF86Config-4.old
[root@localhost chris]# cp /etc/X11/XF86Config /etc/X11/XF86Config-4

Now try startx.
Doing this should at least get you a GUI of some sort.

If this fails and you know you've filled out xf86config correctly, Did you make sure to install X and a display manager? When I installed Mandrake for the first time I chose to install KDE, GNOME and other window managers to see which one I'd like best. Perhaps you unticked all the Window Managers by mistake (clutching at straws now) at install-time?

I had that problem and when I ran setup to select my GUI I picked KDE and rebbot then it was fine.

A quick google search shows many people with similar probs using that video card. Try using the VESA driver temporarily. One of the hazards of being bleeding edge.