Q Being a very, very new user of Linux and an octogenarian to boot, I decided to try Mandriva. Everything seemed to run very well until it was time to reboot the system. I was then faced with a black screen with a request to login, which I did; but this didn't get me very far. I saw a question which seemed to reflect the same problem, so I typed in root and my password, and at the root prompt, typed Xfdrake as suggested in your reply. I got back Command not found'. I also tried the less/var/log/Xorg.O.log to find out some more information and received the message 'No such file or directory.'
A This is a fairly common problem with Mandriva (and previously with Mandrake) installations. Sometimes the installer does not automatically configure the X system for your graphical desktop, usually because it does not recognise either your graphics card or your monitor. When this happens, it gives you very little warning, only a red 'not configured' next to the graphical interface section of the summary screen. The solution, as the Mandriva Linux special tries to tell you, is to log in as root and run the command XFdrake. Unfortunately, this appeared as Xfdrake in print, and commands are case-sensitive in Linux. We do apologise for the confusion this has caused. The person responsible for the letters F and f will be severely reprimanded.