Can anyone help me i have elx installed on a computer how do I log in as the administrator. Also how do I mount the cdrom. I have tried to look at the contents of a cd but no luck. I can open the cdrom.

What does elx stand for ? elix ?

You'd better use suse or pclinux or other big distros which mount and do something more by themselves.

http://www.elxlinux.com/

When you installed, did it ask you for the root (administrator) password?

You can always get into the system as root by booting up and editing the GRUB kernel line to add "single" (no quotes). When the GRUB menu appears, hit any key to stop the count, and then "e" for edit. select, the kernel line, hit "e" again, and then add "single"

When you are booted up in single user mode, you will be able to change the root password by entering "passwd root"

When you installa distro,the first thing you do following the installer is creating an administrator and then,in some as mandriva,an user account too

Then in the konsole to use the root type su or sudo,it depends on the distro,and then your password

That's all !

i recommend ubuntu for beginners; but i have never tried pclinux

Note quite correct. Ubuntu does not do that as it relies on sudo and therefor only asks to setup a user account (not a rot account).

I've installed many distros and i can say,at least for me,that every version of ubuntu-this applies to kubuntu too and happened with kubuntu too-has always some problems in the video driver,it comes a day x-server crashes and it doesn't neither work again with the dpkg-reconfigure and neither editing xorg.conf,so you can:

1)become mad and then finally install ubuntu again

or

2)move to another distro.

The best ones for me are Pclinux,Fedora,Suse,Mandriva,Gentoo and Sabayon;never,never,never they gave me the video problems ubuntu instead gave me..so i use and will ALWAYS use only them.

!!!!!

P.S.:This happened with all these videocards:

Geforce 6600 gt
Geforce 8500 ultra
Intel 945 gm
Radeon 9800
Radoen 1300

Pclinux is much better:more stable,better hardware recognition,better hardware compatibility,less time spent in setups and settings and more time for you !

I suggest you to try it..and throw ubuntu into rubbish..take a look at distrowatch,Pclinux is infact becoming more and more popular and used and has almost the same community of mandriva in terms of forum members

You're right..but i wanted to be generic for understanding purposes and I HATE UBUNTU,IT has always given me only problems..

Welcome to LQ, tleeonly.

The 1st thing you need to learn here is to use better titles than just "help".
Not that I approve of the kind of "steaming" (i.e. just short of flaming, as in flame war) BS about the merits of distros you did not ask about, let alone mention; but your uninformative title has apparently attracted people in a mood to debate the merits of their un/favorite distros. (FWIW, I use, recommend, install, & (locally) phone support MEPIS. )

Next, if you really want help, answer the follow-up Q's we ask you. It's crucial that we know what distro you're actually using -- is the link pixellany posted correct?

I went to the site he linked, & assuming it's the right one, I don't see how many of us can offer particularly specific help w/o more info. than is offered there. I can't tell if it's .deb, .rpm, or tarball based. (& BTW, where is the source required by the GPL?)