Okay...I did it, broke the cardinal rule and was running in root. It was only for a few minutes, right after the install, while I was trying to figure out how to get a non-root user added.

I'm not the most experienced Linux user, most of my time has been at school just simply using GCC and KDE.

I tried to change it so that it would login with bash (using chsh) and put in the wrong directory for bash (just put bash instead of the actual directory).

Unfortunately, now I cannot login as root, and I have no other accounts created yet.

The machine I'm running on is an ancient pentium, I've installed Slackware 8.0.0, using the 2.4.5. kernel.

I have a copy of Knoppix that I can use to boot up and change things, that way, but I'm not sure which file I would have to edit to get rid of the bad shell stuff.

If there's nothing I can do, this was a fresh install, so if I must, I can trash the install and start again, without losing anything but an hour or so of time.

Thanks!

did you try to boot from the cd and follow onscreen instructions to start your system.
( bare.i mount root=/dev......etc ) ?

egag

I can use the CD to log as root, but under the 2.2.something kernel, and only after cancelling out of the install.

Booting from the HDD gets me to the login section, I login as root, it logs in, then tells me "Cannot execute bash: No such file or directory"

Hopefully I'm not coming off as a complete idiot.

does /bin/bash exist any more? if not, edit passwd to point the root user at /bin/tcsh or /bin/zsh so you can log in and re-install bash - or you could try copying /bin/bash from a live CD, overwriting the /bin/bash on your hard drive.

Could you expound upon that? Sorry, as I said before, I am new to Linux, and perhaps Slack wasn't the best of options for me.

Which lines should I edit in passwd?

Thanks!

It seems that I can't edit passwd. I change it, use cat the the file to see if it is changed, it is, and upon reboot, its back to the way it was before

I changed the line reading
root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/bash

to read
root:x:0:0::/root:/bin/ksh

but it keeps reverting upon rebooting

This is some stupid easy fix, and I know it. Just wish I knew what it was, so I didn't have to keep wasting all your time.

Change took finally

Problem solved, thanks for your help!