I can help with your second problem. Basically, you made a bad guess when
you put a * in the password field of /etc/shadow . An * means that NO
password will work - it's used with accounts that the system needs for
various purposes (like daemon and bin) but that never log in. To remove
password protection from root, you do this:
in /etc/passwd, put an x in the password field (just like all
the other accounts should have)
in /etc/shadow, leave the password field empty (::, not : :)
Then you should be able to log in as root without a password.
As to your first problem ... how are you starting X? If you get a command
line and run startx, you can save diagnostic output by instead entering
startx >/tmp/xerrors 2>&1
And, after you exit from X, you can use vi (or whatever you prefer) to read
the file and see what problems X ran into. The blue screen you are seeing is
the normal X screen before a window manager &/or desktop entironment is
loaded ... so the X server itself is working fine, and your problem is
womewhere in the KDE stuff. I don't know KDE, so can't help you more
specifically than this.
At 03:28 PM 7/20/99 -0400, T. Sean (Theo) Schulze wrote [in part]:
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....
> 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.
------------------------------------"Never tell me the odds!"---
Ray Olszewski -- Han Solo
Palo Alto, CA 94303-3603 [EMAIL PROTECTED]
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