bla and Scott_R kindly helped with my problem installing Debian recently, however, I have put this in the too hard basket and have managed to obtain Mandrake 9.1, a much easier installation I have been told. My problem now is that after installing, and rebooting via the harddrive, I finish with the login command, to which like Debian I entered root. I am asked to enter a password, but I havn't given one. Is this where I should be after rebooting, if so, how do I get passed the password. Help would be much appreciated

If you entered no password just hit enter. It should be good to go. How come you have no password? Just thinking about all the bad things that can happen on a broadband connection.

During installation you should have been asked to create a password for Superuser (root) and for user(s). I believe that you can create passwords in Mandrake Control Center.

Good luck,
Randy

i dont think you can continue whit the installation if you dont enter a root password so you have to put somthing in that field under the installation of mandrake.

why not reinstall ? if you never logged in to it you wont miss anything

You can expressly set no password for root in Mandrake 9.1 install. The option exists.

Robin

Thanks all for the replies. I have reinstalled, and thought I had made a note of login and password, but it still will not accept what I enter. As the spider said to Robbie the Bruce, "If at first you don't succeed, try,try again, or was it give up"

You mean it doesnt echo *s at the installer's password prompt?

i mean you cant continue the installation if you dont give a root pasword in the installtion process

Are you sure you are using the same case? Passwords are case sensitive. When you put in the password during the install, Check the 'caps lock' to see if you are in upper/lower case. Do the same when you try to login.
In my above post, I know that you can install without a password. That option is there. With that said, if the poster has a broadband connection, that could open him/her up to some really bad options if someone wanted to do him harm computer wise. There should be at least a root password. You can have a cheap lock on your door, but there is no need in leaving the door open. I have a dial-up and I have pretty good passwords for all user account with root being the strongest.

Check if the keyboard is corectly mapped too

Thanks for all those replies. I was in touch with somebody who talked me through the installation and apparently I was nearly there. You knowledgable people on this forum would know what he was saying , I certainly didn't, when he told me to type su and startx, which got me into root@localhost blablabla#. The # sign showing I was logged in. He said that it could be my graphics card as I had ticked KDE and GNOME at installation. The screen was in fact flickering between blue and a grey screen with a small icon on it. I would be pleased to have comments. I am going to get a new video card tomorrow in any case to try this theory. Are there cards more favourable to Linux?

My two cents worth on this. GET A NVIDIA CARD. Not yelling just trying to give good advice that you can't deny seeing. ATI will sometimes work if the moon is just right and you sit on one cheek when installing drivers, ha ha. I have a $70.00 Chaintech with NIVIDIA chipset and it was no problem getting it to work and affordable. Almost any NVIDIA based card will work unless it was released in the past week or so. They have to have time to tweak the drivers. You know, those cards that cost several hundred dollars.

Hope this helps. If you get ATI you will surely be back.

Thanks for that advice dalek. Very much appreciated

If you get a NVIDIA card you will need to download the drivers. They just got the newest version out. Here's the link:
http://www.nvidia.com/object/linux_d..._1.0-4496.html
Right click and select 'save link target as ...' then save to the root directory. That's the directory that has the etc, mnt, usr, tmp folders and a few others. The way I done was to log out and reboot to failsafe. Pick 'text mode' when it prompts after rebooting. You will get a login prompt. Sorry no GUI here. This is true Linux. Login as 'root'. Do a 'cd ..' until you get to the root directory. Should say [root@computername /]#. Do a 'ls' and you should see the downloaded file. Type 'sh' and the name of the file with a space between sh and the file name. Then it will walk you through the rest. When you get back to the prompt type in "shutdown -r now". That will reboot the system correctly. I've read where people get it installed and don't know the command to reboot. Power switch is a bit nasty.
I have read where others have had to modify the xf86config file. I didn't. According to what I read about the new drivers it does that automatically. I know mine works, at least I have a pretty screen to look at anyway.
If you run into problems, skip to the shutdown part. That should at least get you back to a barebones GUI display.

This should get you off to a good start. Oh, don't try to use DOS commands with Linux. You can make boo boo's in root. If you tell it to delete it won't ask questions when in root.

Good luck.

When you get your driver installed you do need to make one change. Post the contents of "file:/etc/x11/xf86config-4" file. I'll look at it and help you make the changes if mine works.

I'm about to test mine to make sure it works. Wish me luck.