Recetly I installed RedHat 9.0 on my system. I had tried hands on a different Linux Flavour (Mandrake) before this but it didn't work properly on my system. Redhat on the other hand, works fine. It logs off and reboots properly, unlike mandrake. But there are a few problems that I'm facing:
Firstly, the user account that I made on the system is not longer valid. It says something like ' ... this username has expired, Contact the administrator' So I have to log in as root. Can anyone tell me why this has happened ? I was playing around with the fstab file, could this be the reason?
Secondly, as u might have noticed I was playing with the fstab file, how do I mount my windows partition so that I can play the MP3 files? Which program do I use to play the MP3 files?
Lastly, the boot loader (LILO) does not work. Earlier with Mandrake, LILO used to show up whenever I started the system, giving me the option to load either Windows or Linux. But now, I don't get any such options. If I want to load Linux, I have to boot it from the floppy that I created during setup. I don't want to boot from the floppy, its too slow and anonying
I tried to modify the bootloader by booting from the CD, but then it gives an error saying that it did not write anything ? I chose the 'Write to MBR something' option in the boot loader. Am I going the right way ?
Any help is appreciated ...
P.S: I use the 'Linux Customization Guide' as a reference I printed it

My laptop dual boots RH 9.0 and Win XP. It doesn't use LILO it uses Grub. I had no problems with the install. RH took the empty partition on my drive for itself and added Grub automatically. Sorry I am not much help, but maybe manually installing the Grub loader would help.

Lots of documentation can be found in your /usr/share/doc/ directory as well. Anyways, here are some pointers to help you on your way.

1) Not sure about what settings may be in place for expired user accounts. At any rate you can always re-create the account. As root try the adduser command from a terminal, it should guide you through creating an account. If it doesn't then try the useradd alternative. The fstab file is strictly for mounting volumes (cdroms, hard drives, etc).

2) As far as mounting FAT and NTFS partitions go you've got some things to consider. First, NTFS read-support in the linux kernel is still experimental, as is write-support; support for FAT partitions is fully supported. If you don't want to risk anything you can do what I've done: set aside a separate FAT partition for things like mp3s, documents, videos, etc, while keeping the windows OS on its own partition (or simply install windows on a FAT partition).

Here's a samples from my own /etc/fstab:

/dev/hda1 /mnt/win2k vfat uid=500 0 0
/dev/hda5 /storage vfat user,uid=500 0 0

My partitioning scheme has windows 2000 installed on the first partion of the first hard drive (hda1). It gets mounted in /mnt/win2k. It is of the type vfat (a FAT32 partition). The next option states that the user who has the ID of 500 is the one who has permission to read and write to it. Keep this in mind: FAT partitions do not recognize multi-user permissions. Only one user is considered to have such permissions. In my example, I'm the only one who uses this workstation, so I've given my own account (having a uid of 500) read/write permissions. Note the second entry; this is another partition which I've set up strictly for storage (mp3s included). Unfortunately, if several people share that machine you'll have to devise another method sharing mp3s with them.

XMMS is a popular program for playing mp3s, but Redhat have decided (wisely, IMHO) to remove all software not strictly open source which includes support for the mp3 format. You can find an xmms mp3 plugin at http://freshrpms.net.

3) Wish I could give you more pointers on LILO, but if you peek inside /usr/share/doc/lilo-21.4.4/ you'll find all kinds of documention. Like the previous poster I prefer to use GRUB as well. At any rate, writing to the Master Boot Record should be fine. Though I'm kind of surprised that LILO even got installed, I thought GRUB was the new default boot loader in Redhat (shrug).

Well, hope some of this helps :-)

i use redhat 8.0 and 9.0 without anynproblem (except leak memory in apache!)