Mandrake X Startup

[Marr]

Fellow GLLUGers,

My brother-in-law has recently installed Mandrake 8.0.  It has been
working fine for a couple weeks now.

I've never run Mandrake, but I've seen what it's supposed to look like
when it starts up.  He normally gets a graphical login screen (rather
than the text-mode console login that I'm used to).

Recently, for some unknown reason, (after that very ugly, blocky
low-resolution penguin graphic) he's getting a 'localhost login:' prompt
followed by what sounds like a few of the last kernel hardware detection
messages followed by a blinking cursor.  He's able to hit 'Enter' and
login using this apparent text-based console.  From there, I told him to
'startx' (he's very new to Linux) and this seems to get X11 running OK.

Any ideas what has happened that suddenly "broke" the graphical login
that he's used to?  In Mandrake, how is this triggered so that he can
restore this?

TIA....

Bill Marr