Hey there! My computer is an Acer TravelMate 230 laptop with a Celeron processor and 256MB of RAM. I've been a dual-boot Windows XP and Mandriva 2006.0 user for about two months, and in that time, I've had to reinstall Mandriva three times for various reasons. Yesterday, when I tried to update KDE, the entire system effectively went kablooey again - all my data was lost. That was the last straw; I decided to switch distributions.

So yesterday, I downloaded and burned the five SuSE 10.1 CDs from Novell's website, plus the add-on one. I went through all the installation procedures with YaST, followed the instructions as they were given, yada yada yada. When I finally clicked "Finish," the boot screen came back up, and it all went black for a moment, like it was about to start up the KDE splash screen. After a moment, though, it textually asked for my "linux-fmvy login" (right under the boot process stuff). It now does that every time I attempt to boot up in Linux, and when I enter my username and password, it tells me to "Have a lot of fun!" and gives me a command line.

Now as I recall, "linux-fmvy" was the default hostname given during the installation procedure. I had left it that way, since my computer is not part of a network, and the installer wouldn't let me leave it blank. I attempted to reinstall this morning, and the default option changed to "linux-3ri2." Sure enough, that is the message I'm getting now.

Another thing I find odd: the website had me download five ISO's for five CDs. The installation only asked for three. Where do the other two come in, if not to install? Are they just extra software packages or something...?

I've only been using Linux for a couple months, and I hear Mandriva is one of the more user-friendly builds... At this point, I'm about ready to chuck my installation CDs out the window and try Fedora Core or Ubuntu. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

Edit: I suppose it should also be noted that this computer uses a wireless card (Linksys WPC54G with Broadcom chipset) that has no Linux driver. I've been using something called ndiswrapper in Mandriva, which takes .sys and .inf driver files from Windows and lets me go online with it anyway. This is sort of a leap of faith in itself, since I'm not entirely certain how to install ndiswrapper on SuSE (it came with Mandriva), but at any rate I can't go online from Linux at the moment.

Got it! I found the answer in this thread. If I can get ndiswrapper up and running, I'll be good to go.

Aranel,
I installed Linux Suse 10.1 and ran into similar problems logging in, I used the name and password but recieved an error message. Recieved the dos type screen also. I'm using a motherboard with raid which caused a problem, Suse then made me use the safe mode before I could install it. After switching one of my settings to compatabilty mode Suse was able to reinstall and ran without problems. At present I'm trying to get Suse to install my modem. Going through the manual at present.
Carl2