This chapter is written for inexperienced beginners. If you know how to create an icon on the desktop, just ignore this chapter. If you don't , then continue to read. :-)
It would have been easier to write this chapter if people already knew Windows. The decision was made to start from the very beginning, so that someone with very little computer knowledge (who barely know how to move the mouse pointer across the screen) should be able to learn to launch programs, properly close them and shut down the computer. After reading that, all other chapters of this manual should make more sense for you.
We assume that you are seated in front of a running Linux-Mandrake machine which, when turned on, automatically displays the graphical login screen which you will see as the little box in the middle of the screen with two fields in the middle tagged as login and password. This is what you should see if you previously followed the Quick Install Guide procedure.
Given the large number of graphical interfaces available under GNU/Linux, it is impossible to document them all. So we decided to discuss two of the most popular ones: KDE and GNOME.