I have Mandrake 10.1 installed in my old 400MHz P3 desktop, and I got Mandrake 10.2 (Mandriva LE 2005 DVD) in my Toshiba laptop dual boot with you know who. On the desktop computer I get the choice to start my desktop on KDE or GNOME or others. The LE 2005 is supposed to have GNOME 2.8 with it, I installed it, but I don't have the choice to have a GNOME desktop configuration. Does anyone know why? There are some GNOME applications on the KDE menu, but no desktop environment.

I think it's a package selection problem. Did you manually select packages individually for your desktop LE2005?

Best of all, just let the installtion program do the job and if you don't like particular program. You can do it later though Removing software.

The installation process for LE 2005 is very similar to 10.1, so in the screen where you choose what you want installed I chose all, but the games.

Hello!
I don't know if you tried this, but it worked for me.

go to the mandriva control center->system
and click over the icon wich let you choose between the login administrator.
the icon seems like a traffic light, (i don't know exactly the description because mine is in spanish).

Anyway, once there, select the XDM from GNOME (probably the first one)
and click OK

it'll install some packages (if you didn't do that before), after that reboot X11.

Once you're at the login screen again click over the Session button and you should have the GNOME option there.

Hope you find it.

Good luck!

Thanks Aaack, I tried what you said and Gnome appeared, but there where no taskbars and right clicking the mouse only let me use change the background. I browsed through the folders and I found Gnome Config, but I couldn't find any taskbar choices anywhere. So I installed the whole Mandriva again and went in to the detailed install configuration and picked everything. Now GNOME is gone again. So, again tried what you guys told me and this time it didn't work.

Well, the taskbar is a binary called "gnome-panel"
so if you can, do this:
once in GNOME, open a terminal and type gnome-panel
see if you have any error, if it's the case, paste it here, may be I can help you with that.
Good luck!!

Thanks again, but I typed gnome-panel on the command line and all it says is that there is no such command or something along this line. I also tried panel, gnome panel, gnome taskbar, taskbar, same results. So I searched many /bin user/bin and stuff like that, and I couldn't find any gnome panel anywhere or gnome taskbar or gnome menu.
I'm about to give up and install the Mandrake 10.1 Official, which works flowlessly in my P3 400MHz. But if I did that, could I use the Mandriva DVD to upgrade Mandrake 10.1?

Humm, I did some research...

whereis gnome-panel
gnome-panel: /usr/bin/gnome-panel /usr/share/gnome-panel /usr/share/man/man1/gnome-panel.1.bz2

(whereis=search for aplications)

after that I've opened the Mandrake Control Center->Remove Packages and searched by name of file "gnome-panel" and vôila!

gnome-panel-2.8.3-6mdk

Perhaps you should reinstall that RPM...

Or check it's path and see what happened...

So I did the whereis and what I got back was this

gnome-panel:

and that was it. I searched the install DVD for gnome-panel and got nothing there also. I got the DVD from a magazine so I don't know what is wrong with it.
So tried to download just the gnome-panel, but all I found was a tar file, I tried the ./configure, but I got an error. I would post it, but I can't get connected on that computer since I haven't figure out how to use wireless on it and I don't have internet at home. They don't offer DSL where I live and I don't want to pay for dial-up. I'll post later if I don't figure it out first. Thanks again.

Do this:

as root in a console: urpmi gnome-panel <Enter>

urpmi will search for you the package and try to install it if it's not already installed
(but I'm still wandering why the panel dissapeared in first place)

Good luck!

Did it, still no gnome-panel. Not in the computer, not in the DVD. Everything else gnome is there, but no panel.

Try running "gnome-panel" in a terminal to see if one starts up. Post back your results.

done this before and i got bad command prompt. did "whereis gnome-panel" and got "gnome-panel:" for some reason there is no gnome-panel on my installation dvd. downloaded the gnome-panel.tar itself (cause i don't internet at home i couldn't do the rpm right out of mandriva), but wont install, some error i can't post right now.