okay, i'm new to linux but not to computers so we've got the proverbial dangerous little knowledge here.

tried two iso's and various hdinstall howto's and still no success.

knoppix gets the second drive all to itself, win sits on the first. i do a stock install with lilo. i boot from the boot disk it writes. [i guess lilo is on the second drive hence i cannot boot w/o boot disk? but that's a minor mystery that can be cleared up later. this box won't be knx's final home.]

knx loads and i end up in a cli, without kde firing up as it does from the cd or when the cd is simply copied to a drive.

login as root and try startx. x tries and then fails, scrolling off the screen with troubles. startkde puts me in a repeating failure loop till i ctrl-alt-del and go back to the work i'm neglecting.

suggestions? am i simply trying the wrong command? shouldn't the boot disk take me straight into kde?

the test box is a mere pentium 1, but it's happy enough running knx from the cd. second drive is 3gig properly partitioned with cfdisk into about 2900mb hdc1 and 280mb hdc5 as type82. each install attempt has gotten a fresh partitioning so there won't be anything left on the drive to interfere. have made something over six attempts so i'm pretty comfortable with the process.