Q I have just installed Mandriva 2008 'Free' on to my Asus PRO31F Series laptop. It runs Windows Vista Home Premium on 1GB RAM and 100GB of hard drive space. The installer successfully partitioned my hard drive and installed Mandriva. I do not appear to have lost any files in Windows. So far, so good! When the screen comes up requiring log in, all I see is:
localhost login: johnm (my login name) Password: (I type in my password) [johnm@localhost ~] 1$
I apparently have to type in a command - but I have no idea what it should be!
A This has long been a frustration with Mandriva (and Mandrake before it). During installation, the program failed to identify and automatically configure your graphics hardware. The summary screen, towards the end of the installation, will have indicated this, but the warning is not that obvious, so you were able to proceed without configuring the X Window System environment. As a result, you boot into a console login with no graphical desktop. The good news is that you do not have to waste time re-installing the whole distro in order to fix this. When you see the login prompt, log in as root with the pasword you set for root during installation, then run
XFdrake
The command name is case-sensitive, so the first two letters must be in capitals. This runs a text version of the X configuration tool, which you can navigate using the Tab key to move between options, the Enter key to invoke them and the space bar to select choices, such as video card. Once you have set up the correct monitor and video card (the problem is usually caused by the monitor not being auto-detected) use the Test option to make sure your settings work and Quit to save your settings. Now you can start the X desktop by running
/etc/init.d/dm start
In future, the desktop should load automatically when you boot Mandriva. If not, check whether 'Automatically start the graphical interface' is set in the Options section of XFdrake. Once X is running, you can use a graphical version of XFdrake from the Hardware section of the Mandriva Control Centre for any fine tuning you may wish to do.