Hello-

I just installed Ubuntu (after becoming really frustrated with MEPIS and then SUSE), and the login screen has me puzzled. It's asking for a username and password, and of course I was prompted for a password, but I was not prompted to enter a username (that I recall) and therefore could not enter one.

Did I miss something?

Yea it should have asked to you to create one user account on install.

Yea it should have asked to you to create one user account on install.

But it didn't. That's just it.

Have you already installed a second time, watching for that prompt?
Live or alternate install?

I have already installed three or four times, watching for that prompt. Live install. I'm not even sure what an alternate install is.

I did it. I went into recovery mode, did ls /home ,and something appeared in blue. I was out of tricks so I used that as username and used the password, and now I'm in.

The crazy thing is that there was never a prompt to enter username.

What appeared in blue was "oem" (without the quotation marks) in lower case (the login is case sensitive), so apparently if one chooses the oem option from the live install CD, oem is the username, and there is a prompt in the installation for the password.

God forbid anybody should have to go through what I just did. How would I have known that that was the username?

Congratulations, and welcome to Ubuntu! - This is one of the world's greatest operating systems and Linux distributions, enjoy and learn!
Where do you think Ubuntu knew "the password" from if you haven't provided it?

However, if you think this is a bug that might affect other people than yourself, too, you might want to write down the exact steps to enable maintainers reproducing the fault: Document it.

*Question mark*?

[QUOTE]


Where do you think Ubuntu knew "the password" from if you haven't provided it?

QUOTE]

Just to clarify- it's not the password I'm looking for. The password is not the problem, it's the username. I've sat through three or four installs, and there has never been a prompt to provide a username.

I finally got up and running yesterday in the late afternoon, but then when I rebooted about six hours later, I got to the login screen and had the same problem. And then I went into recovery mode and tried to get the username the way I had earlier in the day, but even that didn't work.

I guess I'm just going to have to reinstall.

This is frustrating, because I've already had a lot of problems with MEPIS and SUSIE, and now this with Ubuntu. I will at least say that Ubuntu appears much more user-friendly than those two.

Sorry for that...

The users are stored in a file /etc/passwd. You might want to make a backup of that file:
sudo cp /etc/passwd /etc/passwd~

You could also create a new "fallback" user.

You could also testwise select an alternative session when being locked out by GDM (the GNOME login screen)...

...

Wow, I'ld really be interested in which hardware vendor sold you a computer with Ubuntu pre-installed?!- Wow!

...

*wondering*

Robert-

Do I understand you right? Are you thinking I bought a machine with Ubuntu installed on it?

If that's it, that's not what happened.

So far, I've tried MEPIS, SUSE, and now I am happy running Ubuntu. I downloaded the ISO's, opened them with an ISO opener that I can't remember the name of (it's on my Windoze hard drive, but it was great- just ISO to CD and that was that).

As I write this, my automatic updater for Ubuntu is downloading and installing the updates. This is cool. It's as easy as Windoze (so far), but it's not Windoze.

I'm reading and downloading WINE now.

I hope to be able to find out how to write this configuration to an ISO so that I can migrate it under WINE to my main Windoze hard drive. I'm a little skittish about partitioning and installation for double-boot, so for now Ubuntu is just on a separate hard drive, but when I can "cowboy up" and get this onto my main Windoze hard drive, I'll be as happy as a pig in s***.

And again, to find the username, I went to the non-GUI installation in safe mode, and at the prompt that came up when it all settle down, I just typed in ls /home , and the username showed as oem in blue. At that point, I just took a wild guess that that was the username, and, by golly, it was.

I just thought "OEM" would be "Original Equipment Manufacturer" (Ubuntu pre-installed). I'm not sure how you got this username without typing it, or without having Ubuntu preinstalled. I'm not sure which person or tool had created that user name "oem".
Not sure what you mean. - In case you wanted to create some complete environment (say, operation system + Office + any other applications) under Windows/Linux, and wanted it to run unchanged under another Linux/Windows, there would be VMWare.

& Good luck, of course!

What I want to try to do is migrate the configuration I have on one hard drive and install it as a double-boot on a drive that has Windoze.

May I ask- I had to download the WINE tar.tar with a Windoze computer (because I kept getting error messages in Ubuntu).
I've unarchived it, but what do I use to install it?

Or does that make me a "noob"?

I just had the same problem.

During an "oem" install ubuntu will not prompt you for a username. Try it yourself. It will ask for a password only, you are never given a chance to provide a username.

When you reboot, the login screen only asks you for the password. But if you get it wrong, it then asks you for username and password. Which can be very confusing because you were never given a username.

This "feature" actually makes things hard for new users.