I made a liveCD for Salix 13.37 with XFCE, booted my old laptop from it, the boot seems to have worked just fine and Salix found my CD-ROM drive, keyboard, LCD display and pointing device.

I have read about half the Slackware Book and studied the Salix 13.37 Start Up Guide, and not seen the answer to my newbie questions. There are two immediate problems:

1. I see a GUI screen with a prompt for Username:_____(and password after a username is entered). I don't have a username and don't know where to get one or how to create one. I tried root and superuser to no avail. The Salix doc says the password is "live" but does not give the username with which this password is associated! A blank username doesn't work either (does not prompt for password).

2. The time of day shown on upper right corner of signon screen is 8 hours in the future. Linux apparently thinks my hardware clock refers to UTC rather than Pacific Standard Time. Without being able to log on, I don't know how to fix this. So I'm concerned that anything that might be written to disk will have wrong timestamp on it, possibly causing problems down the road.

Help!

Sky Meadow

Have you considered using the Salix support forum? If you had, you might have found something like

1 members found this post helpful.

The user name is root, the password is live, according to the startup guide, to log in as root. But normally it should boot straight up to the desktop, IIRC.
Also, don't care about the time yet, Salix will not write anything to the disk without your permission.

1 members found this post helpful.

Thanks, I appreciate that. No I didn't go over there yet but I will. My head is kind of spinning with all the unix documentation and forums perused in the past 48 hrs.

Best,
Sky

There is a lot to read--after seven years of using Linux, I can attest that there is no end to things to learn. Just don't try to bite off too much at once.

The best resource for me was Garrels's Intro to Linux--I still have a copy on my bookshelf. It's available in several formats about 1/6 the way down this page.

I like Salix; I have the Fluxbox spin on my netbook.

If you want to dive into the deep end of the pool, you might try Slackware. Arch, Gentoo, and Linux from Scratch, well, they are the Olympic size pools--I wouldn't recommend them for starts.

Welcome to Linux.

1 members found this post helpful.

Frank,

Thank you for the encouragement.

My prior thread is here
http://www.linuxquestions.org/questi...ws-930582-new/

You see, I worked in the hardware/software industry -- mainly at a big blue company -- from 1983 thru about 2005, and have been detesting Windows for more than a decade, and meaning to switch forever but just not quite having the gumption to abandon familiar applications and the security of an OS where I knew how to accomplish most everything I wanted. Then being retired, the IT milieu is no longer around one and there are no longer friends/colleagues' brains to pick when questions arise. One becomes very conservative about making changes when you depend on the PC and cannot replace/rebuild it easily.

One of the very old laptops, though, was just being eaten alive by Windows XP Pro + Norton Antivirus. The only important application I was using it for was ham radio. So a friend talked me into trying Linux. I really had to goad myself. Too much water under the bridge and one becomes gun-shy about wading back into "IT hell" with the possibility of having to debug failed installations, missing drivers, and other faults. So yes I was scared! But so very irritated with Windows XP on that 2003-era machine.

Have already encountered several problems with the Salix Live CD install but they were mainly my fault for reading the documentation too intently! I believed I had to run gparted first before the Salix installer. I planned on dual-boot, over an existing Windows install, but could not resize the Windows NTFS partition due to 3+ bad sectors. I decided to just blow away the NTFS partition, assuming gparted would check the drive and mark the bad sectors to skip, but instead gparted gave me unresolvable errors! "Failed to mount "%", The enclosing drive for the volume is locked". And couldnot easily write the Save Details data to media since there isn't a file system; the file system is in memory and will disappear on reboot.

Just on the off-chance there might be some help for the issue, I tried the Salix Installer and it was very friendly! It invoked gparted but this time detected the partitions I had already created, formatted and applied them with NO ERRORS, and is busily installing software from the CD.

So the initial off-taste has turned to a pleasant taste (I think).

Thank you for the documentation reference. I will definitely look it up.

Thanks to all who man these forums. Without the kind "hand holding," there are many users like me who are otherwise capable, who would not dare to make the leap to Linux.

Best wishes,

Sky

There's a good tutorial for the cmd line here http://rute.2038bug.com/index.html.gz.
Don't be scared, just wade in and have fun.

Linux distros have gotten very good at designing friendly installers, since it is the rare person who can bring a Linux box home from the store.

Welcome to Linux world. Enjoy the ride.

I'm still not up and running. Here is my latest set of issues relating to mount failures after partitioning.

http://gparted-forum.surf4.info/view...d=29066#p29066

Sky