problems booting in (mandrake)

[freetard]

im having trouble booting up mandrake 9.2 i have installed it correctly (i think) I EVEN USED A HANDBOOOK! but it wont work, it give me options of (i use a bootloader) linux-enterprise, linux, linuxnofb (or something), failsafe and windows (yes i need it for school). When i choose any of these options besides windows it will load in, then a screen will come up saying local host login (or something along those lines) and ask for my username, so i input it and it then asks for a password but the problem is i choose not to use a password for the host thingy and just for my user account along with this when i try to enter anything into the password area the text wont appear, ive tried everything i can think of and i dont know what to do anymore, PLEASE HELP ME oh and one last thing im extremely newb to this and not that computer savvy so it would be appreciated if you could keep it as simple as possible thanks!

[drakebasher]

when i try to enter anything into the password area the text wont appear, ive tried everything i can think of and i dont know what to do anymore

How's this for simple: just enter your password. You may see nothing written to the screen, or in some systems you would see an * no matter what character you enter. This is in part to prevent someone from watching over your shoulder as you log on and thereby stealing your password.

[freetard]

im sorry i wasn't that clear, you see i've tried typing in my password and i press enter but it says there's an error and asks for my user name and password again, i've also tried using no password but it still says error when i try to log in...

[drakebasher]

Remember that Linux is almost always case-sensitive so make sure your caps-lock key has not been pressed. Are you able to log in as root? If so, delete the regular user and create a new regular user. If you can't log in as root, try using your install CD in "rescue mode" (read the messages when it boots) and then modify the file /etc/passwd by deleting the first 'x' on the line which starts with 'root' and then rebooting with no password. Be sure and make a new password right away with the passwd command.

[freetard]

alright i'll try that, also i just had a look at the boot screen again i dunno if this helps at all but it says localhost login thats the part im having problems with localhost login: and i insert the username then it asks for password and doesn't do anything, when i try it without a password it comes up with <myusername>@localhost somethingrather and the just sits there, i type stuff in and all it does is say invalid command. thanks for your help so far, i'm gonna go see if this works

[drakebasher]

alright i'll try that, also i just had a look at the boot screen again i dunno if this helps at all but it says localhost login thats the part im having problems with localhost login: and i insert the username then it asks for password and doesn't do anything, when i try it without a password it comes up with <myusername>@localhost somethingrather and the just sits there, i type stuff in and all it does is say invalid command. thanks for your help so far, i'm gonna go see if this works

If you are talking about a screen with text only, it sounds like you have gotten to the command line. That's good. As long as you have a command line, you can do whatever you want. Graphics can come in short time. My command prompt looks something like this:

[crs@ueda crs]$

The first crs is my username and ueda is my hostname or what I have named this computer. The second crs shows the currect directory and the $ means that Linux is waiting for a command. Try entering any of these:

ls   <--displays the contents of the current directory
ls -l    <--same, but with more information
ls /   <--contents of root &#40;top&#41; directory
fdisk -l   <--partition tables of all of your hard drives
help   <--gives help info for command line
help | less   <--allows you to scroll up/down so you can read all of it &#40;press 'q' to exit&#41;
startx   <--might start X windows if it's configured correctly
less /etc/X11/XF86Config  <--display the configuration file for X windows

If you need to do dangerous things with your system, you need to be root. You can log out and log back in as root or, at the command line you can enter 'su -' (that's su <space><dash>) and then enter the root password when requested. You'll see the difference with that command 'fdisk -l'.

[freetard]

cool alright i'll go try that, thanks for the help. hopefully it'll work

[freetard]

WOOOO! YES IT WORKS!!! thanks a bunch, you've been a lot of help thanks

[drakebasher]

That's great, freetard, I'm glad I could help. So now you need to learn alot more about Linux. RUTE is a very thorough reference, sometimes only a little out of date in some areas. But it covers alot of ground and it can be downloaded free. To do that, look at the program wget.

This link has a list of Linux commands with information on how to use them. And when you don't know the name of a command, look at the command 'apropos'

Cheers~