Mageia forum

I wish I had learned Linux when I was younger.
I will passionately hate hate Tony Blair and Bill Gates forever.

I had a stroke a few years ago and remembering passwords was one of the biggest problems I had from it. No use writing them down either as I would just f rget where I put them.

In my opinion a totally worthless addition to the topic, which in itself is already years old.

isadora wrote:In my opinion a totally worthless addition to the topic, which in itself is already years old.

How do you value worth?

It does not contribute anything meaningful to the topic.

doktor5000 wrote:FWIW, a repair-install isn't required. At the bootloader, simply add init=/bin/sh to the kernel command line after pressing F3 and selecting Default, and at the prompt change the root password via passwd command.

What must be done if I boot with Mageia-8 EFI? I see no option for pressing F3

On UEFI systems you need to mark the relevant line in grub you want to edit, and press "e". Thats quite standard for all distributions with UEFI grub2.
https://wiki.mageia.org/en/How_to_set_up_kernel_options#With_Grub_2_bootloader_2

Now I started my Thinkpad T61 which had not been used since some time, had Mageia 7.
The note i had on what root password it had was even elder

This is how resetting password worked out for me:

1) added "init=/bin/sh" to the kernel command line, got me to a root prompt
2) issued "passwd", and entered new password:
Problem: it responded “passwd: Authentication token manipulation error”
After a web search and some checking I found that / is not writeable.
(maybe because this system have / in LVM?)
2b) Fixed it with "mount -o remount,rw /", then passwd worked.
3) had to reboot using ctrl-alt-del, then all OK.

Uppgrading it is another adventure
Most mirrors do not carry mga7 repos. I found one:
# urpmi.removemedia -a
# urpmi.addmedia --distrib http://distrib-coffee.ipsl.jussieu.fr/p ... .1/x86_64/
# urpmi --auto-up
That went well
rebooted
changed to mga8 repos
Upgrade finished while I was writing this on same system
And now going to reboot and change to mga9 repos, upgrade, test.

Yes total time and data would be less if i did a fresh install, but this is an exercise.

over and out.