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It finally fell into place. I got the network going in it, I had remembered that something, tfa? ...said that if a device wanted a login, to use “user” as the user name. But that didn’t work. Maybe it was connecting it to an Android. But it was too simple for me to immediately understand.
In its file manager (I didn’t pay attention to its name), under “network” it listed everything connected to the router, including the drive. Clicking that pulled up the log in screen, and all that was needed was clicking “connect”.
The answers in the last journal were all helpful and mostly informative, but no matter what method I used, its security blocked me. Damn, Windows is easy to hack! One mentioned another Linux on a disk or a thumb drive, and after a couple of beers I thought, with a start, “Hey, I have another Linux on that drive!” So today after lunch with my oldest, Leila, at D’Arcy’s, I fired up the Linux computer and booted to the kubuntu side. I was able to easily access the Mint side with Dolphin, but the key directories that would let me at it were blocked.
I probably could have used a terminal, but I avoided it, read the links you guys supplied and tried them. All were excellent, but didn’t work. And after an hour or two my brain kicked itself in the donkey and said “dumbass, how long did it take to install Mint, and how much time have you spent trying to reset the password? Is your math that bad, dimwit?”
So my brain rubbed its ass and put the disk back in. Now, when I first installed it, I wasn’t sure if Mint would be the answer to my problems, or suck, so I tried it out from the CD. When I saw that I could get on my network, I installed it from an icon on its desktop.
That was a mistake. It was the cause of all my woes. This time, I chose OEM install from the boot menu. It came up as before, and I told it to overwrite the previous Mint installation.
That made a world of difference! Poking around in this still dark and unknown distro, I discovered that I was in a temporary administrator account. A window popped up to update, so I updated, using the brain dead password I had told it when I first installed it. Then I went to install Audacity and XMMS and the few other apps not installed by default that I needed, once again being thankful that I didn’t have to uninstall a lot of third party cruft like you always have to do with a Windows computer.
But XMMS said its package manager was broken. So I went to install GIMP, one of the package manager’s highlighted apps. It, too, said it was broken, but I knew better. There was just too much data trying to fly through the wires at once, and the installer choked. The updater was moving like molasses in January, so I switched to the Windows computer and started typing this.
I flipped over to the Linux computer (my TV is my monitor), and there was a login field. Damn. So I moved the mouse/keyboard dongle back to the Linux computer, and kept entering wrong passwords until I realized I wasn’t logging in as the temporary administrator, which I’ll have to delete.
Everything works now, and I want to thank you guys for your help. I may do another reinstall later and just give it the whole two terabytes.
(Score: 3, Insightful) by Runaway1956 on Wednesday March 15, @09:04PM (5 children)
With any Linux that I have used, I always install to a smaller hard drive, or at least a smaller partition. If you have to reinstall, you keep your /home drive or partition. Keeping /home means that all your settings, documents, downloaded files, and whatever else is still there when you reboot to the reinstalled Linux. You will, of course, have to reinstall all of your applications, but the settings should 'just work' once you've installed them. It's nice to boot for the first time, fire up Firefox (or whatever your browser) and find all your bookmarks, login credentials, everything just like you left it.
FWIW, my root partition is 78 gig, and it's only using 38 gig, leaving roughly half of that root partition available. With the way everything on computers grows these days, you might want to give /root 100 gig, to future proof things a bit.
Save the rest of your pterodactyls - errr - terrabites - uhhh - terabytes for something more useful.
Abortion is the number one killed of children in the United States.
(Score: 2) by hendrikboom on Wednesday March 15, @10:05PM (4 children)
Next time you should try editing the /etc/password and shadow files and removing the password from the line defining root. Keep those lines for root, just make the password the empty string.
Do this editing using -- of course -- another Linux system.
Then you should be able to log in as root without a password.
After which you can do any password setting you want to do.
(Score: 2, Insightful) by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday March 15, @11:02PM (3 children)
If you're in another linux, you can just chroot and use the passwd command to change the password directly. Anyone who's ever installed gentoo or built an LFS system understands how this works.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @02:05AM (2 children)
That is such a common pattern that GNU added the ability for passwd to do its own chroot so you don't have to create one just to change a password.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @05:10AM (1 child)
It doesn't ask for the existing password (that said person doesn't know)?
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @07:40AM
If passwd is run as a user whose ruid has permissions on the passwd file, then it assumes it is the superuser and will change it without asking. There are a number of ways to get such a permission. As an example, you could be locked out of user Bob. You could run directly as root (passwd Bob) or (sudo passwd Bob) and it will change it without asking. Or you could run it on a live environment, mount your system to /mnt/other and run (sudo passwd --root /mnt/other Bob). A fun one is to use the same system with a bind mount and map the fsuid to your standard user's UID and run a command with the root set to the right target.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Thursday March 16, @05:15AM
You should be able to resize the smaller partition into as big as you want- up to all available contiguous space of course. Not sure of all possible ways to do it, but one is "resize2fs". Very likely a GUI utility exists that will do it for you.