fedora8 login problem in text mode
 

Hi. I am installing fedora8 from a disk on an older HP laptop. There was not enough RAM for the graphical installation. At the end I get a text prompt for my username.
Since I never got to choose a username, what do I enter?
New to Linux and thanks for the help.

localhost login
 

It is a text prompt for localhost login, not username.
Thanks for the help

Did you receive this prompt prior to installation, or when you selected to install using text mode? If it was pre-install, try user: root pass: root

Not sure if it'll work, but worth a try.

Also, if you're using an older machine you might want to try a lighter distribution... **damn small linux, slackware (if you know what you're in for), zenwalk (never tried it, myself), etc.) Good luck.

It was post installation. When I use root as the localhost login I get
[root@localhost~]# and I do not know what to do with that.
A lighter version may be what I need.

After you logged in as root, what you are seeing is the bash shell prompt. Looks perfectly normal to me.

If you are one of those who fear the command line I can understand your grief. Please run the commands shown below to check the space remaining on your HDD and the amount of free/available memory on your system; and please post the results. F8 shouldn't be taking much space after an initial installation... probably no more than say 5-6GB. Linux distros can run on 256MB RAM, but the more RAM the merrier. Generally 512MB is the considered the "minimum".

Oh, well it sounds like your booting into Init 3, which was probably what the default became when you chose a text install. If you want to change this, you could do two different things. Either you could type "startx" (without quotes) at the prompt to load X11, which you'd have to do everytime you want a gui. Otherwise you need to edit the inittab file.

To change your init mode, do the following at the cmd line:
cd /etc
vi inittab (you need to be familiar with the basic vi cmds; i for input, etc.)

now find the string that contains the default runlevel. Usually right after the runlevel descriptions...here is an example of the string

id:3:initdefault:

in this case the default init mode is "3" (like yours), which is multi-user mode. Simply make the change from 3 to 5 (X11/GUI), and reboot your machine

Hope that solves your problem

Thanks. It looks like there is just not enough RAM.
I may try DSL or just donate this old machine.