really sorry if someone already answered this somewhere

i just finished installing mandrake 9.1 and i rebooted. then it asks me to localhost login. i wrote root and the password then it gives me the command thing

[root@localhost root]#

i asked around and people told me to write startx but after i press enter nothing happens

can anyone please please help me?

i would really appreciate it

thank you,


Extreme noob that cant even boot OS

Actaully you have booted the OS. You just have not started the Graghical interface known as X-windows. The question is why you cannot start it from the command line and my guess is you did not install it.

Did you download Mandrake or purchase it in a box from a software store? If you downloaded you should have downloaded 3 ISO images and burned them to 3 CD's. If you bought it, there may be more CD's I think the powerpack has like 7 or 8.

Now if I read the rest correctly you have booted to the shell, and logged in as root correctly. You then typed startx and hit enter when nothing happened? Did it give you some kind of error message? did it say command not found or did it just do absolutely nothing?

first, don't login as root if possible. Provide your normal username and password.
Now, when you enter
startx
at the prompt (and press enter) literally nothing happpens? Do you get the prompt back? Any messages?

thx for the help guys

someone told me to switch the graphics card and it helped.. linux is now gui

if only i could figure out what now..


can anyone recommend me a book or a site that will tell me who what how and why to do in linux... cuz so far the only thing i can do is play reversi and switch themes..

thanks again

I think the question is what do you want to do with your computer? If you want to browse the web look for mozilla {though personally I suggest getting firebird from www.mozilla.org and using it for browsing, but avoid the thunderbird news/E-mail app. Its hideous and ridled with bugs ATM}.

If you want to edit documents ror spreadsheets look into open office {should be installed already} if you want to do development, try the KDE IDE, and pick a lanuguage you installed {C and C++ only by default I think}. Do you want to run a router, or a webserver? Linux is after all just an OS, its not like having found superman or anything. So what do you want linux to do?

well basically i only want to do one thing

make a program (game that someone did) work

but when i follow his instructions it says to write
./configure

when i do that it says i need STL.

how/where can i get that to make the game work?

thanks

I believe that would be in the stlport package, which you can pick up HERE

how do i open/install it?

unless its acompnied by a readme

ok i doubleclicked it
it installed ok, although it told me the signature was wrong

still didnt help with game, do i need to do something else.

It is possible, maybe if you post what game it is in the Linux Software forum and describe what you are doing and what errors you are getting {IE are you installing this by recompiling it or ??} they can help you get all the dependent packages fouund and installed so you can get the game to run. Best of luck.

it is a gomoky game that learns from its mistakes

you can get it here

http://www.student.nada.kth.se/~d92-jwa/code/

go all the way down

if anyone can get it to work somehow please tell me

I think I know what your problem is, the app is looking for an OLD stl.h header file tht seems to have been discontinued by gcc and SGI some time ago. They really should document this shit better.

You can get it by searching for it in google, but even then once configure works, make craps out, so I'd just give up on this one unless you consider yourself a sadist. My one real beef with linux, they have the most poorly designed distributions system ever.