Mark, There's a way to fire off an interactive boot and then telling the startup not to start decwindows, I don't have the details handy right now, will look it up unless someone else knows it from memory - I'm a relative noob here as well.. :) As for loading licenses, just load all of them :) I find the easiest way to get the licenses loaded is to burn a CD with a text file containing all the lines from the hobbyist email starting with a $ sign, calling the file e.g. LOADLIC.COM. I then mount the CD as follows: MOUNT/MEDIA=CD-ROM/UNDEFINED=(STREAM_LF:132)/OVER=ID <DEVICE NAME> Then just run the license file: @<DEVICENAME>:[000000]LOADLIC.COM Sampsa On 16 Jun 2011, at 21:14, Mark Benson wrote: Well I'm stuck now. I couldn't get my Licenses to validate during install so I skipped that part and put them in later. I put in the base license for OPENVMS-ALPHA and rebooted the machine. Now I am presented with a DECwindows login screen (which is some welcome progress) and I can't log in because I get the 'LMF license check has failed' error (no DECwindows license??). If I could get out to a command-line terminal I can input some more licenses but, unlike any other CDE/Motif system I've used before the 'Options' menu has no 'Command Line Login' option. Is there a boot flag from the SRM console or a special keystroke command I can issue, or any other method to get me to a command line? Also does anyone know which licenses I will need to enter and operate the DECwindows 1.6 environment? -- Mark Benson My Blog: <http://markbenson.org/blog> Follow me on Twitter: http://twitter.com/mdbenson "Never send a human to do a machine's job..."