Chapter 21: Frequently Asked Questions

This chapter answers some of the most common questions about using Red Hat Linux that you may ask as you become more familiar with it. From recovering forgotten passwords to troubleshooting package installation problems, this chapter will ease you step-by-step through some common tasks to help get you on your way.

Localhost Login and Password

Question: I have installed Red Hat Linux. After rebooting, I get a message telling me it needs a localhost login and password. What do I need to do?

Unless you specified a host name for your computer or received that information from a network, your Red Hat Linux installation will call your machine localhost.localdomain by default.

When you get to that initial prompt, Linux asks you to log in to your system. If you created a user account during installation, you can log in using that username and password. If you didn't create a user account during installation, then you can log in as the root user. The root password is the system password you assigned to root during installation.

Note

You should create at least one user account during installation. If you did not, you can create a new user after logging in as root with the Red Hat User Manager GUI application or with the useradd command-line utility. For more information, refer to Chapter 2.