[LBo] Password Problems

[Anita Lewis]

Lynn Gallup wrote:
> With my new understanding of the various CLI's I am now able to 
> understand the comprehensive posting by Jisao on this subject. However, 
> when I use one of the keyboard methods he suggests (such as ctl+alt+F1) 
> I am unable to satisfy the login requirements. For some reason, my 
> password satisfies "su" when I initiate a terminal via KDE but no user 
> name or password will satisfy the request "linux login:" when I use 
> Jisao's keyboard method. Anyone know what's going on here?
>  

If it is possible to login as root on your system, then you would use 
'root' for the username and the root password and it would login. 
However, not all systems allow root to login.  In that case, one must 
login as an ordinary user and then su to root.

The disabling is usually achieved by editing /etc/securetty and 
basically making it an empty file.  You could take a look at that file 
to see if this is the case.

> Secondly, I have been exploring the Linux environment with YaST but I 
> cannot find any way to view or change my superuser password. Possibly 
> this is just not a YaST-type function. How does anyone get to a level of 
> control deep enough to manage passwords?

Login or su to root.  Type the command: passwd.  That will ask you to 
enter the new password twice.  That does it.  You can change any user 
password in this way.  root can also change other passwords by adding 
the username like this:

passwd joesmith

The new password for joesmith will then be entered twice.

Anita