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You don't. As administrator (root), you can assign a temporary password and then let the user modify the temporary password to one they wish to use.

How do I log on as root and assign the temp password?

If you've lost ROOT's password you'll just have to re-install your system. With Windows there are some tools for recovering administrator passwords but I think this is virtually impossible in Linux.

Treat this as a learning exercise --NEVER LOSE ROOT'S password or you'll have trouble.

If you haven't logged on as root just type SU on to a console and enter roots password or go to YAST / User administration and assign a new password for the user.
YAST will prompt you for ROOT's password.

Cheers

-K

+1 - what he said.

Unlike Windows, where passwords can be cracked too easily, linux makes an effort to keep The Bad Guys from gaining information they shouldn't have. Increased security comes at the price of increased annoyance on occasion.

Yes they are correct you cannot recover passwords on linux you must reset them. but if you have physical access to the system it is quite easy to reset the root password as well. just pop in a live cd, mount your root filesystem, chroot over and passwd.

I would rather not give instructions how to crack a system. How do we know that gamesfan9000 is talking about his own machine? Just my

I have my roots password,but I lost my normal users password.Please help.

I see your point, but seriously if someone wants your data what stops them from kicking your door in and taking it? hopefully a good lock. there is very little you can do if the attacker has physical access to the machine.

gamesfan9000,
if you have the root password just log in as root and use passwd to change the password; my user is steve so I would:

funny reading all this.

this one is even better:
Ever heard about runlevels?

run
#init 1
and you will be logged as root (single mode) and without even asking about password! Jeezz

There is a lot of information about recovering root account. This has nothing to do with cracking.
All OSes allow to reset root password.

anyway, you can't recover root password but you can easily reset it. This is my howto:
http://wiki.suselinuxsupport.de/wikk...strootpassword

to reset user password by root see above by johnson_steve

broch, a big +1!!!

abisko00: never forget a cardinal rule about the Internet: "On the Internet, nobody can tell if you're a dog". Maybe gamesfan9000 is a most evil cracker, maybe he's just a newbie who hasn't learned the Linux way yet, and maybe he is a dog. If we all assumed the first assumption, there'd be no point to having this site; any piece of advice might support some dark and evil scheme. Let it go, abisko00, let it go...

I got it.Thanks a lot.

Hmm, strange that my concern appears so funny. I am fully aware that this information is easily available online, as is how to build bombs (sorry if I exagerate here). It's just that one should at least keep in mind that a potential harmless information you give away in good faith may be used to do something improper. In a case where this appears likely (come on, there where indications: short post, few information, only a few posts in this forum), I rather refuse to make things even easier.

RBEmerson: I don't think that my opinion on this topic would make sites like this obsolete. There still is a difference between helping to fix a broken KDE and telling how to reset passwords.

gamesfan9000: I apologise if I offended you. If you'd given the information that you know the root password, your post wouldn'd have sound as suspicious to me.

yes, it is funny,
password resetting is a part of any OS maintenance (unfortunately). As far as I know this is not the case of bombs.
Want a proof? Check out Novell's Coll Solutions (although this guy simply copied my howto without even asking for my permission or at least informing that because he is lazy, he simply copied my text). The same goes with MAC spoofing (considered as a heavy "hacking"? for no reason) which is usefull when ISP depends on NIC hardware address and card went bad (so instead of hassle of calling them, disscussing the reason of the change, I prefer spoofing MAC. It takes 30 sec for me because I type slow). Of course anyone who wants to use MAC spoofig for some sort of attack will know ho useless this is.


I prefer sanity over overzealous "consciousness".

Funny also
to be able to run init , you need to be root (you've put a # in front), so whats the point of going into root again?
And then, on a lot of distro like debian and i bet a lot others, you fortunatly need root password to enter single user mode.
So it doesn't work...