I have been searching and searching and etc. for about 4 days now trying to find a way to change the password on Knoppix. It is a major pain in the butt not even being able to change the time. It would greatly please me if someone could help me out here. (complete newbie to linux)

My friend had a copy of it and burnt it for me, I went home, popped the cd in, went to the desktop, time was wrong. So I went over and tried to change it, needs an admin password. I called my friend and he said he doesn't know anything about it. So I come here and search around, I find a couple of methods like "linux single" and all that it says at the LILO screen is cannot find kernal image linux. What does that mean anyway? There should be some way to change the root user password shouldn't there? If any of you could walk me through this, I'd be absolutely grateful.

Thanks in advance.

This is a distribution that runs off CD, correct? I don't know the structure and mechanics envolved there, but try hitting a tab key at LILO boot prompt, it should tell you the name of the image, so use that name and append single to it.
Ex.
LILO:<Tab>
knopix
dos
LILO: knopix single

Yes, it does run off of a cd but that didn't work. My friend who made me the cd said that when he downloaded it from the site, it had the password on there also. Linux is supposed to be an open source OS right? So I don't see why they would put a password on the root user so you can't change anything...strange

At the "boot:" prompt when the cd starts to boot, type: knoppix 2
This will bring you up into runlevel 2, at the prompt type passwd to change roots password. type passwd knoppix to change the default knoppix users passwd.

Note: the passwords will be lost when you reboot.

Once you have changed the passwords type: su - knoppix
This will get you in as user knoppix, then you can type startx to bring the GUI up in runlevel 5.

Thanks, but I had found another way a couple of days ago:

sudo passwd knoppix

that then brings up:

Enter new UNIX password:

and now I can fool with the root stuff. Thanks anyway though.

HI.

Newbie here that's also taking a poke at Knoppix Distro.. I believe I read that there is no root password by default. I've been able to open a shell as root and mess around.

well I'm just sitting in front of it and it HAS a root password that I don't know.

I just tried the tip of pinkegobox but it doesn't work either.

so how am I supposed to bring up that ISA network card now, dammit

edit: stupid me

I should have typed "sudo passwd root" to change root's passwd

I just switch to a virtual terminal (control-alt-F<N> N=1-6) and that has root privileges.

alt-F<N> (seems to change from boot to boot) will eventually find X again.