Hello all, I am a computer sales and service guy in a small town in KY. I have started to grow a small Slackware Linux community here and so far have been able to resolve any customer requests doing a search here on Linuxquestions, but just today I got one I could not fix this way. First off let me say that I AM A LINUX NEWBY! I know where most stuff is located..or how to use Locate if not. I can Jed a little and rebuild a kernel if I need to. That's about it so answers in plain simple is best A customer asked me if there was a way to A. Hide all the loading text that scrolls by at startup. B. Have it boot to an account selection window (like windows). For myself, I hardly ever use items like this..My mentor is training me in the use of the command prompt only at this stage, but the end users like pretty GUI pics and seem to freeze at the first sign of a text prompt of any sort. So there you go. I know I can set it to autostart KDE (or your xWindow of choice) after login. I do that on my wifes account, but that is not what I was looking for. Any help is appreciated even if it is just a link to a hint

set /etc/inittab to

I'm not sure about A., but for B.

it's simply a matter of editing the /etc/inittab file.

Slackware defaults to runlevel 3 wich is the text mode login you will want to change the default runlevel to 4 to automatically load the graphical login screen.

the line near the top you just need to change the three to a four. (I'm not running slack at the moment, otherwise I'd post the line.... it pretty clear once you read the file though).

edit:
bird603568 beat me to it

As for the text, I have no idea. It reminds me its working :-)

The login screen usually appears when more than one user is created. You can, however, get a login screen that does that specifically. Check out kde-look.org.

You can use the Login Manager in KDE to add some eye candy to your graphical login.
It can be used to add a custom background and login icons for users.

Thanks all. The items listed were exactly what I was looking for

There might be a way to disable text output on boot. But I strongly advise against it ... very very strongly against it. What if you get a kernel panic and you don't know what it says. Now that would suck !

If they want pretty GUIs ... guess they should try Ubuntu or somethin

LOL, While I understand that, my customers wouldn't. Noone here had even known there were OSs other than windows. I agree about no text output being a Bad Bad thing. But you know end users. The want fluff and they want to point click and never see any text that isn't surrounded by some form of colored graphic.

bootsplash (& Co.) is what will hide the startup text. It's not easy to implement under Slackware, though.
You can hide the messages from the kernel itself by including 'quiet' in you boot command options. And the rest could be hidden by commenting out echo commands in the init scripts.

Well, I guess you could try, but make sure there is some way to actually read errors if something goes wrong. I dunno, if the kernel panics, will it spit out errors that you can read that bypass the 'quiet' option ? I know most times when kernel panics ... it's time to press the reset button, cuz the kernel won't respond.

I just tend to see what might go wrong ... cuz you know it will. I'm a strong believer of Murphy's laws

in /etc/lilo.conf try adding

append="console=tty8 quiet"

to the section of the kernel you want to quiet down. That will prevent kernel messages from being printed and redirect the stuff from init to tty8 (alt-f8).

create another section without that if you are paranoid

Yeah, that's a good idea. Have the normal startup use the quiet option, and then add another entry to the bootloader, for the same kernel, where you can actually see what's happening (no quiet option).

Pass the quiet boot parameter to the kernel when booting from GRUB or LILO. If you later want to read the boot output results, open /var/log/dmesg. Don't worry about kernel panics as they will override the quiet option and let you know if things stall.

Modify /etc/inittab to boot to init 4. Or, you can pass the init 4 option as a boot parameter. Or you can do both:

Configuring Slackware for a GUI and a Command Line Startup
Configuring Slackware for a GUI Startup—Part I
Configuring Slackware for a GUI Startup—Part II

Don't be so pompous and condescending. Especially when you admit to being a newbie. Were you born with perfect knowledge?

That's good to know. (and something I didn't know )

I think, for the most part, it is very true. That's what most end users want. I don't think it is pompous or condescending to say that, cuz it's also true. If it weren't true .... maybe we would all be using Linux ...

Or if it's pretty they want, you could add some colour to the startup scripts.