Hello all,
I have essentially two problems I hope you can help me with.
Back in May, I assembled a computer for my daughter from bits and a
motherboard a friend gave me. I had it up an running, tested it out and
then shut it down. One thing led to another, and we didn't get around to
setting it up again until tonight. When we booted it and entered her
username and password, X and KDE started up just like I had set it up.
But when KDE had finished launching, all it showed was a powder blue
screen with the X-shaped mouse cursor in the center of the screen. The
right mouse button brought up a menu, but all the icons and taskbars that
were there in May were gone. At first I thought the resolution was set
wrong and tried to change it with "Ctl Alt +". That didn't get it. When
I used the right mouse button menu to logout from KDE, I saw a message on
the console that KFM had crashed. Any thoughts you all have on a way
forward here would be appreciated.
My second problem came when I tried to log in as root to fire up
XF86Setup to fix what I still thought was a resolution problem. It seems
I forgot my password, because the machine refused to let me log in using
any one of the three passwords I seem to remember I might have used when
I set the machine up. Anyway, using Tom's Root/Boot disk, I rebooted the
machine and mounted the partiion with the /etc directory. Using vi, I
edited passwd to leave nothing between the two colons delimiting the
password field. I also edited /etc/shadow, replacing the encrypted
password with a *. I also saw several other files such as passwd.orig
and passwd.orig.o, but I didn't touch these. Long story longer, when I
rebooted the machine from the hard drive, I was still not able to get
logged in as root. What other brain surgery do I need to perform on
this, or is a complete re-install probably the best solution for both of
these problems? (Since she hasn't used the machine yet, there is nothing
to lose but the time it would take for the install.)
Cheers,
Sean
Theo. Sean Schulze
[EMAIL PROTECTED] [EMAIL PROTECTED]
*******************************************************
Chaos, panic, & disorder-my work here is done.
