after i load slackware 13.1 and reboot it comes up with .welcome to linux 2.6.33.3-smp (tty1) then darkstar login. what do i use for login and password. ron

your username and password

If you have just installed Slackware, you may not have created any users. In past versions, the first login required me to log in as "root" with no password.

Once you are logged in, your first order of business should be to set a password for root. Even without a password, you can look at the instructions for setting your root password using

man passwd

I tried leaving the root password empty. This led to headaches later. One notable instance was that when I tried to install printing with CUPS, Linux told me I had insufficient privilege. I was pretty frustrated to have Linux tell me that I had insufficient privilege when I was logged in as root! Printing did not work for many months until I set a password for root. After I set a password for root, installing CUPS went without a hitch. I don't think the CUPS manual ever mentioned that it required root to have a password. Likely the CUPS folks never imagined that anyone would do something as unsafe as failing to set a password for root.

The next order of business is to create a non-root user so that you can log in without root privileges. For this you use the adduser command. You can only run adduser when you are equivalent to root. This command prompts for all the inputs it needs.

Then the safest thing to do is to restart and log in as the user with limited privilege. On the other hand, messing up something on a new installation won't cost you very much because you have little installation-specific information on the machine. If something goes really haywire you can simply install again.

If you are new to Linux and Unix, one of your first and best friends is the apropos command. Type in apropos <word> and apropos will show you a list of commands which contain <word> in the description of the man page for the command. For example,

apropos user

will give you the very long list of commands which contain the word "user" or longer words which contain the letters "user" in them in man pages.

And, by the way, if you are new to Linux, welcome to Linux!

And here's a searchable copy of the man pages http://linux.die.net/man/