Before going any further: don't habitually run GNOME as root. When I boot Linux up, I start at a text prompt. How do I start GNOME? With luck, you should be able to type startx to start X and GNOME will start up. If you're looking here, though, it probably means this didn't work. The solution will depend on the exact problem and on the distribution you are using. If the problem is that X starts but you get something other than GNOME on top of it, some distributions have tools that let you avoid editing text files yourself: Red Hat and Mandrake Red Hat Linux and Linux Mandrake both come with an application called switchdesk. This can be started within X or run from outside it and lets you alter your desktop between GNOME, KDE and (on Red Hat) AfterStep. Nice and simple. SuSE SuSE Linux uses YaST to configure X and what happens when you start it. You should be able to tell it to start GNOME as the window manager when you start X. (Yes, confusing terminology.) On SuSE, you should also simply be able to type startx gnome to start GNOME up. If you have one of the above Linux distributions, use the method listed above. If not, then you will need to look at the following: If the problem is that X starts up but either KDE starts or neither KDE nor GNOME start, then look for a file called .xinitrc or (possibly) .Xclients in your home directory. Edit it with a text editor. If you don't have a favourite editor yet, friendly editors for new users are pico (comes with a help screen switched on) and joe (if you like the old Wordstar keys, you'll like this). You want to remove everything from it and end up with just this in it: exec gnome-session. Save this file, and then retry startx. If the problem is that either you see a great mass of scrolling messages and then you get your prompt back with an error message, or that the screen clears and then nothing more happens, then you have problems with your X configuration. This is beyond the scope of this FAQ, but first steps to fixing it are to become root and re-run your X configuration tool. I want GNOME to start when I boot Linux up. How do I do this? The old answer to this used to be to edit the file called /etc/inittab, which contains the list of what to start when as the machine boots. However, this has become more complicated because it involves setting up the correct display manager (of xdm, kdm and gdm). Foolproof answers to this question which work for different flavours of Linux are solicited eagerly. For those systems which come with linuxconf, Brett Castleberry suggests, Assuming that Gnome already starts properly when you startx, you can do it with linuxconf. As root in an xterm type linuxconf". When it comes up go to Config boot mode Mode default boot mode and click on it. Select the Graphic & Network button and Accept. This certainly works on Red Hat 6.2, as does the reverse (selecting Text mode & Network to stop booting into GNOME). There is probably a preferred way to do this with SuSE which involves YAST. (Details, anyone?) It starts. Now what? Well, what do you want to do? You will find almost everything by clicking on the GNOME menu which generally appears as a G-shaped footprint with a small arrow next to it to indicate that it's a menu. Clicking on some of the other things on the panel will also make things happen. If you run out of things to click, you can poke around further by right-clicking on the panel, too. This author recommends investigating the games early on.