Sorry if we're a bit slow dealing with your problems at the moment. We're all a
bit snowed under dealing with *real work*.

Now to answer some recent questions:

1) Some people have been having problems with X not starting correctly. There
used to be something in the FAQ about this but I suspect it may be a bit out of
date. There are two issues here. Firstly, the device drivers need to be
correct. Secondly the X server needs access to the device drivers.

The device drivers used by X are (IIRC) /dev/mouse, /dev/kbd and
/dev/vidcvideo0. If you have device problems the symptoms are that startx runs
as root, but the display fails to change or the mouse or keyboard don't work.
If this is the case you probably missed out the Configure stage of the install.
Don't Panic - you don't have to reinstall. Just do the following (as root)

        cd /dev
	./MAKEDEV

If this doesn't work then you have found a BUG. Please let us know which device
files are missing and we will try to fix them ASAP. You can workaround a
missing /dev/mouse by doing

        cd /dev
        ln -sf quadmouse0 mouse

Normally the console hardware devices are only readable and writeable by root.
This is to stop users logged in remotely being able to log your keypresses for
instance. If you are the only user on your system then this is not a problem
and you can change the access permissions as much as you like. There are two
other alternatives. One is to use xdm to start X. This will give you a
graphical login and will sort out the access rights for you. If you want to use
startx as someone other than root then do the following (as root):

        cd /usr/X11R6.1/bin
        chown root X
        chmod u+s X

I believe that there is an rcm option which does this.

2) Always use either rcm or vipw to edit the password file. vipw uses the vi
editor by default which is a complete pain for beginners to learn. IMHO,
however, time spent learning vi is time well spent if you intend to learn UNIX
because you can almost guarantee that it will be installed on any UNIX box you
will ever use. (If anyone would like a simple introduction to using vi I have
written one to get people started). You can also change the editor vipw uses by
setting the EDITOR environment variable.

All you need to know now is how to debug accounts which are behaving oddly. If
you can log in as a user then the id command will tell you their user id and
groups. User id 0 is reserved for root (root doesn't have to be called root,
but this just causes confusion). Group id 0 (wheel) is the group of people who
are allowed to su to root. Typing

        echo $HOME

should tell you where the user's account is located.

        ls -ld $HOME

will tell you who owns their home directory. This should be consistent with the
output of id. Each shell has a startup file which is executed when the user
logs in. The user startup files are called $HOME/.profile for sh and bash, or
$HOME/.cshrc and $HOME/.login for csh and tcsh. These startup files are the
source of the 'don't log in as root, use su' messages for the root account.
Note that files starting with . do not normally appear in directory listings.
To get ls to display them use

        ls -a

(-a = all). Another useful variant on ls is

        ls -F

which adds an extra character after some files to show what type of file they
are. For example a * gets appended to executables and a / gets appended to
directories.

With any luck this information should allow people to obtain enough information
about what is going wrong that we will be able to help.

Best of Luck

Rob