Can't boot into GUI

[GreenestHorn]

Hi, I'll try not to waste much of your time.

I just installed Mandrake 8.2. It had several errors when it installed, asking me to continue anyway, etc.
Basically just wanted to know why it keeps booting into a command prompt, and not into some form of GUI. I know I sound retarded being I've already stated that there were errors, but none of the errors seemed English to me, so I had no idea what wasn't loading correctly, and what wasn't.

Any help would be appreciated.

[Saptech]

You should have posted those error messages so we could really help you out with the situation.

What happens when, at the command line prompt, if you type startx?

[GreenestHorn]

Well, late into the night, I got Mandrake installed perfectly. Btw, there were at least 50 error messages before, no way to write them all down.

Linux looks good, seems to run perfectly. Now I'm just at the point that I have no clue how to do anything but surf. No complaining, as I knew there'd be one humongous learning curve. Hopefully I'll stick with it, and quit having to pay enormous amounts of money for other OSs.

I plan to buy a book to help show me around Linux (Mandrake specific), otherwise I'd be asking questions here every day (i.e. how do i check mail?; how do I play a cd?; how do I download and actually find programs and install them?).

I'm sure even with a book, I'll have questions, but as I stated in my first post, I don't want to be much of a burden on the community here.

Thanks for your reply, and wish me luck, cause as my username states, I truly am the greenest person to ever install Linux.

[mdwatts]

Just start reading as many threads here as you can and also the NHF's.

Next visit your distros website and read their documentation.

After that try the how-to's/faq's at www.tldp.org and search around Google for Linux ( www.google.com/linux ) for just about anything you need in the way of Linux documentation.

There is enough Linux reading material on the web to last anyone a lifetime plus.