After login I face a black screen.......

[going-bald]

Hello.
I am new to Mint but have used Mandrake/Mandriva for some years as a USER. I am NOT experienced with Root's activities but I can occasionally find my way around the OS, so, if you suggest anything complicated please explain what you mean.

Yesterday, 22/04/2013, I downloaded and burnt etc. Mint Nadia Cinnamon 32bit live DVD and ran it on my laptop, an Amilo Li3710. I liked it so I installed it.

During the install process I reformatted the partiton destined to be / but I left /home/'me' untouched. ( Having just written that it makes me wonder if there are some settings left from Mandriva in /home/'me' that are messing things up? There's nothing of value in there so I can reformat it if needs be during another? reinstall of Mint or..... can I reformat it under the running, installed Mint?)

When the installed Mint booted I ended up at a black screen showing, as icons, the contents of my home directory. I could open a terminal but the likes of firefox would not open, (the revoling symbol disappeared without firefox opening). After a bit of surfing, via my pc, I came across a an article somewhere that suggested running startx from the command line, bingo! a 'proper' desktop but after a bit of 'play' I see that some things are still not fully functional.

Qu1) In threads about Mint the use of "sudo" seems popular, is there any particular reason for this and is there any advantage over "su" ing?
Previously, if I wanted to make some minor system change, I have been in the habit of "su" ing, on the command line, and entering Root's password. (in Mandriva, users' and Root's details were set up at towards during the install ).

In the article I read the writer said that "startx" seemed to have permanently fixed the black screen thing but that is not the situation for me. Plus, once I have a proper desktop it seems it's 'running' with "elevated privileges" which I do not like!

Qu2) How do I start X automatically?

Following further surfing I tried "Xorg -configure", this was done both on a black screen just after a boot and later after running startX. I recollect getting the error messages "server is already active for display 0". Where is display 0?

At some point I happened to ctr alt f through f1 to, I think, f8 or f9 and on one of the higher f numbers screens it looked like a log was being written or appended too with an error message about a cache, this was apparently being re-tried about once a minute. After running startX this screen was the one which had the 'functioning' desktop.

Qu3) Does the search window in Software Manager normally start searching as soon as a letter is typed in? It seems to on mine and I thought it had frozen and closed software manager several times before inadvertently leaving it running long enough to complete its search for the letter "e", I was looking for emacs and, prior to my accidental discovery, the 'only way' I found "emacs" was to copy and paste the word emacs into the search window.

Thanks for any replies.

[going-bald]

I did a reinstall during which I reformatted the old /home/me and it seems to have done the trick.

Ok I may have screwed something up the first installs but what???????

If it was residual configuration files left by the old Linux, Mandriva, I think that this is perhaps something that should be looked at, I am reasonably certain that I will not be the only non-guru who is migrating from one flavour of Linux to Mint, the pun is unintentional, and this was an off putting problem.