Slackware newbie here.

I installed Slackware (10.2) on an old Pentium II someone gave me.

The problem is, I don't know the login name and password! I didn't fill in anything for it during the instalation, but it's asking for one. It boots, and I see "darkstar login:" but again, I have no clue what to put there. What do I do?

BTW - Just a little heads up, SUSE runs slower then Winblows XP on a Pentium II (400 MHz, 512 MB of RAM). Yep, I installed XP just to see how it would perform. It sucked, but not as much as SUSE. O.o That's why I'm going for Slackware. SUSE's still my favorite distro, but NEVER install it on an old system.

Login is root. The password is the one which is asked at the very end of installation.

Username: root
Password: just hit enter if you didn't set one upon installation

Got me the first time I ever installed Linux too...

darkstar is the default machine name.

Maybe from the John Carpenter SciFi movie?

Bit of Slackware trivia here, from slackbook.org:

Easy enough to change if you want to, but I rather like it.

YAST eats up a huge amount of resources on a slow PC.

I was running a home server on a Pentium 100 with 64MB RAM (text mode).
Originally running Debian Woody it ran fine.
I thought I would try Suse 9.1 and utilize YAST. I had to create a swap partition for the install program to use and after install many YAST functions took minutes. It was not acceptable at all.
Both installs were base systems in text mode with about the same minimal programs. The big difference was the YAST overhead.

Just prior to doing an upgrade I was running a Celeron 500 with 256MB RAM and Suse 9.1. It was okay but I had to drop into ICE rather than KDE to even start Mplayer. Again Mplayer ran fine in Debian Woody on the same PC.

YAST creates overhead to begin with that is not present in Slackware.

I always change the prompt as one of the first things after installing. I have a couple of things I always but in ~/.bashrc. So I don't see much of darkstar...

Thank you for asking the question. I was also wondering who "darkstar" was. I did a search and found nothing until today.

Did you try running one of the "lighter" windows managers with SUSE instead of KDE or GNOME? FVWM seems to run a lot faster than KDE--and it looks nice (to me) as well.

umm, i've never messed with SUSE.... I kinda thought loggin in was the first step. Did they throw a point and click gui in SUSE (like Mandrake) or something?

The post was referring to Slackware 10.2 after it was installed. When you start the system, you can get the command line prompt "darkstar login:"

But you can change host and domain name in network setup. Mine is currently TheVoid

I use Slackware 10.1 with KDE 3.3.2 on two "old" boxes: a 400 MHz K6-III+ with a 66 MHz FSB and a 350 MHz PII Deschutes with a 100 MHz FSB. Both with 256 MB of RAM and 40 GB Barracuda IV hard drives. The K6 box uses a Diamond Stealth 3D 3000 video card with 4MB of RAM and the PII uses an AGP Creative Labs Voodoo Banshee with 16 MB of RAM. Neither box is a screamer by today's standards.

With my current installation, screen response without X is as fast as I could want. In X/KDE I am quite content with the screen response. I suspect I'll see a nudgingly improved response when I update to KDE 3.4.3. My NT4 OS is still faster by comparison (sigh), but my experience lays to rest the old fallacy that KDE is bloated and can't run on "old" boxes. I'm happy without spending a lot of buckazoids on bleeding edge hardware.

Anyway if u dont manage to boot into slackware without knowing password there always is a backdoor.
1. Boot into box with any available rescue disc (e.g. slackware cd2) or linux live cd.
2. Mount ur root partition.
3. Open ur mnted root partition, open /etc/shadow. The first entry usually is teh root user entry. Delete anything thereis between first and second colon (':') -
was:becomes: 4. reboot ur box
5. when asked for login just enter 'root' at the prompt and hit enter. Viola! No password required!

Duhhh.. just dont tell u allready didnt knew this :^)

That's way to easy. Is there a way to make shadow unwritable, so nobody can change it once the passwords are set?