Many thanks, Srdjan, Steve, and Wayne.
On Mon, 7 Sep 2009, Srdjan Todorovic wrote:
That's an old kernel - I expected better from a Gentoo user ;) Do you not emerge --sync often?
I do my updates with emerge --update --newuse --deep world. I was starting to suspect that this omitted the kernel.
it dropped me straight to a shell with root privileges, with no need to enter a password.
Yes... what did you expect? ;)
Same (or very similar) shell, but with the usual username/password prompt to get into it.
Take out the option - comment it out?
Already done - hopefully temporarily, until I make the necessary changes to the option. But presumably I also need to do something to stop anyone getting to a menu entry editor or grub command line - although actually I think I've now sussed out how to do this, with a password entry in the header of the grub configuration, from the grub manpage.
of a minimal-services, non-GUI boot. Any ideas, please?
Erm. Setup the correct services to run on some other run-level other than default? I don't know enough about Gentoo's runlevel system, but the handbook states you add services to the default runlevel by: rc-update add service_name default
Had already got that far... persuading grub to choose a runlevel other than default was my trouble.
You *want* to read this (change appropriately for your architecture): http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/handbook/handbook-amd64.xml?part=2&chap=4#d...
Thanks, that (particularly section 5.4) helped a lot.