Filed under: Linux, Troubleshooting
Stupid Ubuntu tricks: 5 Steps for resetting a forgotten password
by Brad Linder May 12th 2008
It happens to everyone. You have so many usernames and passwords that you can't remember them all. Fortunately, Facebook, Gmail, and about a billion other online services have a "forgot password" link. Just click it and the web service will either email your password to you or allow you to reset it and enter a new one.
But what happens when you forget the password for your operating system. Not that this has ever happened to us, but hypothetically let's say we were trying to perform a fresh install of Ubuntu on a laptop this afternoon. We zipped through the installation screens so quickly that we may have accidentally inclued a typo in our password. So when the installation was complete, our (still hypothetical) computer booted up, loaded a splash screen, and then wouldn't let us login no matter how many variations of our password we type.
While you might think the easiest thing to do is reinstall Ubuntu, (after all, this is a clean install so it's not like we'd be losing any data on our hypothetical system), you can save yourself 15-30 minutes by changing the password. It turns out you don't have login to change your password. As we discovered thanks to a useful post on the Ubuntu forums, you can do it from the bootloader screen. Check out the 5 easy steps after the jump.
With Halloween fast approaching, it's a great time to get in some practice defending your territory against zombies. In Graveyard Shift, you take aim at zombies and other creepy-crawlies, blasting them into splatters of cartoony green guts. It's a casual first-person shooter, and it's very easy to get the hang of - use the mouse to aim, click to fire. Graveyard Shift has at least 15 levels, and it might even have some secret stages I haven't unlocked yet.
They key to getting good at Graveyard Shift is learning to use ...
