I am a newbie to linux and i just installed zipslack 9.1 on my computer. When it boots up it says something about /lib/libcurses.so.5 and then goes to the login. I login as root, but then when i try to execute programs like 'xfree86setup' and 'pppsetup' (i haven't tried any others) it gives me an error message error while loading shared libraries: /lib/libcurses.so.5 : file too short and it won't run it. I want to run x and everything else, so what should i do to fix this and what causes it? Any help will be appreciated! Thanks.

Either ncurses wasn't installed or is corrupt. Try installing the latest package. You can grab it from ftp.kpn.be

Some programs like the one that is called when you say 'make menuconfig' in order to configure your own kernel need ncurses-devel. I haven't found this anywhere as a single package and re-installing the ncurses package didn't help when I had this same problem a few months ago. I re-installed Slackware as a whole. There is certainly a better way but I didn't know it then. Anyway. the problem went away.

Try this after download the latest package of ncurses:

ls -al /var/log/packages/* | grep ncurses*

If it lists ncurses first remove the package like this:

removepkg /var/log/packages/ncurses*

This will remove the package and now if you grabbed the tgz from the ftp site I mentioned above, simply do this, after moving the package to /var/log/packages

installpkg ncurses.x.x-i486-0 (note you will want to put in the actual version numbers you downloaded, etc)

This should fix the problem the majority of the time. If that doesn't work, let us know as a whole reinstall is always the last option when dealing with Linux.

Yes, I agree.
It's normally what you would do when you encounter a "Class B" problem in this strange other system. But at least, it's easy to categorize problems there:

Class A: Reboot!
Class B: Re-install!

But in the concrete situation I had already tried a number of things, and not found an adequate solution. So I went for a new install, which was quickly done as it is a tiny system.

Thanks for your hints!

Alex