I've installed a Slackware 12.0 distribution. When I boot, things look OK in the lish window and I get a login prompt.

However, when I try to log in as root (using the password I set up in the distribution page of Dashboard), I'm denied access with 'Login incorrect'.

I tweaked my configs and rebooted my old system and then mounted the Slackware 12.0 disk and poked around. Lo and behold, the Slackware 12's /etc/shadow is writable by other! No wonder login wasn't letting me log in. In the 12's /var/log/secure were entries like:
Aug 9 10:17:05 liX-X login[874]: ILLEGAL ROOT LOGIN on `tty0'
Aug 9 10:17:11 liX-X login[874]: invalid password for `root' on `tty0'
Aug 9 10:17:17 liX-X login[874]: ILLEGAL ROOT LOGIN on `tty0'

I fixed the permissions on /etc/shadow and rebooted the 12 distro; but I'm still unable to log in....
Aug 9 10:32:05 liX-X login[871]: ILLEGAL ROOT LOGIN on `tty0'
Aug 9 10:32:12 liX-X login[871]: ILLEGAL ROOT LOGIN on `tty0'

Anyone know what's going on?

-C

The shadow file permission setting is obviously wrong, and we'll get that fixed. But, just so you know, the first user you add those permissions will be repaired automagically.

I think you need to add tty0 to /etc/securetty. This was reported to us a few days ago; we'll get that fixed as well.

Thanks,
-Chris

The Slackware 12.0 distro has been quietly repaired, both the shadow problem and the securetty problem. Thank you!

FYI, the distro contains some packages that can't really be used in the linode UML environment:

dhcp
kernel-huge
kernel-modules
kernel-modules-smp
lilo
module-init-tools

You can save quite a bit of space by removing these. Perhaps Caker could remove them from the distro.

And, to fix the curl problem, http://www.linode.com/forums/viewtopic.php?t=2827, this package should be included in the distro:

libidn

or perhaps curl should be removed from the linode distro...

Thanks again,
-C

I was mistaken about the shadow file being fixed. At present, in the Slackware 12.0 distibution, the /etc/shadow file is world-writable (until useradd is run...).

-C