newbie: login with no password. Help!

[Romeyn Prescott]

At 6:10 PM +0000 12/11/04, Simon Burke scribbled:
>On Sat, 11 Dec 2004 12:38:30 -0500, Romeyn Prescott
><prescor at digirom.potsdam.edu> wrote:
>>  At 11:59 AM -0500 12/11/04, wulf scribbled:
>>  >I'm not sure about whether you'll need to do a reinstall. I don't quite
>>  >understand what Gabriel is suggesting. If I were in that situation, I'd
>>  >probably try to boot the machine from a Live-CD distro, mount the
>>  >hard-drive, and see what I could do from there (-chroot- comes to mind
>>  >but I'd have to look it up to say more).
>>  >
>>
>>  Boot from Knoppix or some other LiveCD...or even a rescue floppy.
>>  Mount your filesystem and edit /etc/shadow.  Find your username entry
>>  and delete the password hash.  For example, fir a user "fred" you'll
>>  see an entry looking something like:
>>
>>  fred:$1$zeW7t1ge$0RUxnN2RsbiWPJOcYVpF/0:12746:0:99999:7:::
>>
>>  Delete everything between the 1st and 2nd colons so you have:
>>
>>  prescor::12746:0:99999:7:::
>>
>>  Reboot normally and login as 'fred' using no password.  Then set a password!
>>
>>  >However, assuming you do get a user account sorted out you can then
>>  >configure the login manager to let that person log in automatically.
>>  >That would be the "right" way of circumventing the login security; you
>>  >need a user account to fit into the filesystem permissions structure.
>>  >
>I agree to a point, my  point is why dont you switch to another
>console by pressing <ctrl><alt> + <F2>
>
>the login as root.
>

How can you login as root when Ubuntu installs with an 
unknown/scrambled root password?

...ROMeyn
-- 
signat-url: http://www2.potsdam.edu/prescor/signat-url.htm