do you have to do anything to type your password to login on mandrake 10.1
it won't let me type anything at all under login and when the pass. is incorrect it says home/jonathan doesn't excist.
logging in with home = "/"
-bask-2.05b$
any help thanks

You messed something up during the setup of users.

At login screen hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 and log in as root using the console. (You do remember your root password, right?)

At command prompt type "userdel jonathan" - this will delete the jonathan account you may have.
Then do "useradd jonathan" - this will recreate it and also create the jonathan home dirctory.
Then "passwd jonathan" - here you set a password for the jonathan user.

Now hit Ctrl+Alt+F7 to get back to the login sreen. Try logging in with the new password you gave to jonathan.