On Sun, 4 Sep 2005, William Chops Westfield wrote:

> On Sep 3, 2005, at 11:08 PM, digitaladdictions wrote:
>
>> I really do think modern Linux distro's are easier to use than windows
>> and involve less tinkering. I realize people are scared to type but
>> with a single command you can download and install a program, without
>> worrying about finding it or any of its dependencies on the web the
>> package manager takes care of all of it for you.
>
> Heh.  I just turned on my debian linux system, after about a year of
> not using it.  I wanted to install gputils and such, figuring that
> would go somewhat more smoothly than it did on my mac...
>
> So, after six hours or so of recovering from a forgotten root password
> (wasn't it nice of it to configure itself so that booting in singleuser
> mode wasn't sufficient to fix such things.  Anyone know how to turn
> that "feature" off?), I fired of deselect, eventually figured out how

Put the shell name as a kernel parameter. e.g. ... init=/bin/bash

this will drop you into bash as root. man 7 bootparam

Just dont't lose the root password of an OpenBSD system.

> Hmm.  600+ Megabytes of assorted systems updates.  Including who knows
> how many megabytes of KDE "games" that were "required" by a mysterious
> chain of dependancies, plus "edutainment" packages with useful stuff like

You can break out of the elephantine dependency lists by installing 
packages manually.

> it's working!  "Package managers make things easy" - HAH!

For users who use default options and update when told. (you probably 
accumulated half a year's worth of updates)

Peter
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