Heres an interesting take on Howard's problem. On the p 466 that I
installed on on Friday evening, there is a problem with framebuffer.
Neither gentoo nor knoppix seem to be able to start in a framebuffer and
you end up with the standard old dos resembling 80x25 screen.

Anyway when I added the splashimage command to /boot/grub/grub.conf and
rebooted I got a blank screen when the menu should have come up. It
booted into the default, so obviously everything was working, except no
menu came up on the screen.

Once I took out the splashimage line, it worked properly again.

As the lack of a menu screen was Howard's symptoms too I wonder if this
is related? ie if Howard took the splashimage line out of grub.conf, I
wonder if it would work?

(Actually now that Howard has lilo working, he may not want to f***
around any more. I am recording this for the benefit of future googlers
who may have the same problem)

On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 17:55, Nick Rout wrote:
> On Sun, 2004-05-16 at 17:42, Christopher Sawtell wrote:
> > On Sunday 16 May 2004 12:25, howard blomfield wrote:
> > > in all the confusion with cdrom
> > > cables falling out/not being able to boot from a floppy etc i think i
> > > have scrambled both root & user passwords
> > 
> > This should be quite easy to fix.
> > 
> > Disconnect ( As in pull the plug out ) from the net and boot the 'puter with a 
> > Linux boot-disk.
> > Mount the partition which has the /etc filesystem on it. /dev/hda9
> >   (In Howard's case, iirc)
> > 
> > Edit the file /etc/shadow to remove the second field for the user who has 
> > forgotton his p/w
> > 
> > Then as the root user change ( for example ):-
> > 
> > root:$1$mrOheWcA$35ey/kyasdfasdfdfgac/1:12498:0:::::
> > 
> > to
> > 
> > root::12498:0:::::
> > 
> > Root now no longer has any password.
> > 
> > Recreate the password:-
> > 
> > passwd
> 
> warning , this will change the password of the boot disk, not the gentoo
> install (unless you chrooted per my previous email, in which case you do
> not need to fiddle with /etc/shadow anyway.)
> 
> > 
> > You can now change the users' passwords thus:
> > passwd Joe
> > 
> > It's safe to put the 'puter on line again now. ( ok, I am paranoid )
> > 
> > Use a sequence of numbers and letters which you will remember but will be 
> > meaningless to others. I use old, abandoned, telephone numbers, and bits of 
> > street names dredged up from the past. Don't use a word from the dictionary, 
> > or a name of any kind.
> > 
> > Your keyboard problem in Mdk can be solved by selecting a US keyboard.
> > there is also a utility called xmodmap which you can use to alter key to code 
> > mapping. I believe there is a GUI frontend for it, but I forget the name.
> 

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