well obviously i don't use bloatware like kde in the first place.

Format

every time i install Linux i select format existing partitions. i've installed Linux about 5 times today so far...... there's still a good 7 hours of formatting left

formatting an ext2 should take about 1 minute tops, you'r not doing it in dos are you? anyway.... have you got shutdown going or not?

shutdown now as root doesn't work for me either anymore. It used to.

well, your first problem isn't the celeron, I have a 400mhz celeron and it boots up in about a minute using Slack8.0. It might also be that your running it on a eMachines.. and if its actually staying on the emachines logo at bootup for 3 minutes, there is something definitely wrong with your machine, sounds like it might be a BIOS problem or having a problem detecting your hard drive.
I had a machine do that, it would just hang for about 2 minutes while detecting the hard drive to bootup.. it would fail every other boot. Replaced hard drive, fixed problem.

oh well.. my 2 cents.

It should be either:

shutdown -r now for reboot

or:

shutdown -h now to halt

Absolutely correct linuxcool. And remember, the effect of ctrl/alt/del is controlled by /etc/inittab. And further remember, Chooco, that a console is always available in KDE, as was pointed out in your other thread, so it is possible to edit inittab to control the runlevel at boot time as well as control how ctrl/alt/del works.

well it works now but i have to do the super user thing before turning it off. why can't just anybody turn off the computer?

because then anybody could then turn off the computer. Linux (as a unix clone) is primarily a large scale multi user operating system. you could have installed linux on your nice new IBM z/390 server. now some user at your company comes along and logs in remotely and turns it off.... you really think that'd be a good thing to be able to do? obiviously not, and you have to appreciate teh scalability of the system. You can always use something like mandrakes consolehelper or change the permissions on shutdown and then anyone should be able to do it, but it's understandable to have to specifcally say it should be so.

O.K., just go back to DOS.

And actually, if you have ctrl/alt/del set up in /etc/inittab to do:

/sbin/shutdown -h now

then any user can shutdown with the three finger salute.

heh you want a laugh go to anandtech forums from that link he gave u and do a search on chooco his posts are rather amusing especially his war waged against linksys products

linksys IS f***ed, i gave that router to my friend and he gave it back saying "that thing is a f***ing piece of s***, it disconnect me then changed my IP so nobody could find my server"
my buddy's sort of between a linux newbie and linux guru and he is very patient, if it doesn't work for him then something is seriously wrong......he spend 5 full days uninstalling and reinstalling wine, configuring and reconfiguring until he got it right. he had my router for 2 days and he just gave up and handed it back to me. i don't know wtf to do with it, it's completely useless, linksys wants 30 dollars to replace it (they call it sh!tting and handling) and futureshop says that it's linksys' responsibility.
my D-Link router works great, no problems.