Hello one and all

I won't waste your time with introducing myself unless you're interested (available in the Member Intro forum, link was available, but removed because I do not have 5 posts yet)

I wasn't sure if I should post this in the Laptop forum, the Hardware forum, or the Distro forum, so I picked this forum.

I have an old laptop. Dell Latitude CP Pentium I 233MHz, 92mb ram, 2gb HD, BIOS Ver. A16, Mandrake 9.2 and a Xircom CE3B-100BTX PCMCIA card.

Here are my problems

Root Login
When I am at the "localhost login:" point, I cannot login as root. I know some of you will say that I shouldn't be logging in as "root" and I don't. I only use root for the commands that my normal login will not allow me to do because of lack of administrator privileges. I'm more curious as to why I am prevented from logging in a root, and how I can disable this.

On a side note, when I load up Linux, I have 4 options, "linux-secure", "linux", "linux-nonfb", and "failsafe". All of the issues I will be discussing will be booting up with "linux"

Date Problem
To change the date of my system, I must then login as "root" ("joe" does not have enough privileges) and I can change the date there. If I change the date in "root", when I log-out of root (and back into "joe"), the date has changed. Although it is no longer doing this, (I can't get it to repeat the problem), what might be the cause of this?

Xircom Card
Upon boot-up, I am presented with:
So as you can probably tell, I cannot get the internet using my laptop. How do I go about fixing this (it can see and recognize my Ethernet Card). So what seems to be the problem. Please excuse my lack of knowledge in this field, as I am so busy with school in my last semester, that I do not have time to read the books required to get this up and running properly without some help. Anyhelp would be greatly appreciated.

For your Ethernet card, is it a PCMCIA card? If so, it looks like your system is booting network then PCMCIA when it should be reversed. I'm not one to be asked about changing the boot order (as I have not looked into that yet), but a temporary fix would be to add a script rerunning your network service to your equivalent of rc.local. As for the root login problems, it's pry a setting that you can't login as root at the prompt, but you should be able to gain full root access to your system with su. Again, hope this helps even it is temporary, I'm sure others would be willing to give you real fixes to this.

Alunduil

Wow, that was an increddibly fast response. I like this board a lot.

As for the root problem, I use su -l when I need it. Thanks for mentioning it though.

As for my Xircom card, yes it is a PCMCIA card. As you mentioned about the boot order, this was also something I suspected, but I assumed Linux knew what it was doing, and had reasons for this boot-order so it was probably something else.

*bump* I know I'm still a newb, but I'm hoping that there is a solution to this problem