I have Mandrake 7.1 install in two partitions on my hard drive. One is using linux-2.4.0-test4 and devfs. A couple of things happen when using devfs. One is that you can't log in directly as root. You can log into a user account and then use 'su root' so this is not a major obstacle. The other problem is you can't run startx from a user account or the root account. Both of these problems have solutions documented in the README file that comes as part of the documentation with the kernel. On my system it's in the directory: /usr/src/linux-2.4.0-test4/Documentation/filesystems/devfs/. The fix for the root log in problem is to edit the file /etc/securetty and add the following to the end of the file: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 The startx problem is fixed by editing the file /etc/security/console.perms and changing the line: <console>=tty[0-9][0-9]* :[0-9]\.[0-9] [0-9] to <console>=tty[0-9][0-9]* [0-9][0-9]* :[0-9]\.[0-9] [0-9] While the fixes listed in the README file worked with Mandrake 7.0 they have no effect with Mandrake 7.1. I would assume the staff at Mandrake has had some experience with this since the initialization script rc.sysinit is setup to start devfsd. I would appreciate any suggestions on how to work around these problems. Thanks, Brian Chamberlain
