"All great masters are chiefly distinguished by the power of adding a second, a third, and perhaps a fourth step in a continuous line. Many a man had taken the first step. With every additional step you enhance immensely the value of your first." - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Ubuntu 5.10 - Comments

Thursday 27th October 2005

Categories: Reviews, GNU/Linux, FLOSS

All comments not written by free-bees.co.uk are owned by the author, and free-bees.co.uk is in no way responsible for their content.

11. Submitted by Anonymous, Friday 28th October 2005

One thing I noticed about Ubuntu was that I dual boot with Windows XP and although that partition is mounted on the Ubuntu desktop, the only way I can seem to get into it is through the command line. Clicking on it gets me a popup saying I don't have enough permissions, even though I added my user to the "root" group. I'm still looking for a fix for this.

This was a very great review; one of the best I've read so far. Keep up the good work!

12. Submitted by Jim, Friday 28th October 2005

Apple does not seem to agree with you about security and the use of sudo. OSX uses precisely the same setup as Ubunu, where the first user gets full sudo privileges, and there is no root password.

13. Submitted by C. Heaven, Saturday 29th October 2005

This is the second article I have read that states /suggests the root password is randomly generated in Ubuntu. None of our Ubuntu systems demonstrate this behaviour when examining /etc/shadow.

From the Breezy laptop that I am currently working on:

root:*:13039:0:99999:7:::

admin:$1$iWbNInWw$UKI4k2x1ebMEM6QuWeeYE/:13039:0:99999:7:::

admin is a regular system user with a password set, while root is in it's default Ubuntu state with no password declared.

Can anybody actually confirm an Ubuntu system where the root password was randomly generated as opposed to no password being set?

Please note that the pam configuration does not allow any user to log in, or authenticate without a password being set.

14. Submitted by Mike, free-bees.co.uk, Saturday 29th October 2005

In response to #13:

If you note in the article, I wasn't actually sure about the root password - I was told that the password was randomly generated, but I didn't check it myself.

15. Submitted by Anonymous, Saturday 29th October 2005

Youre review was quite good. I think the universe isnt enabled by default because of legal reasons or something. About the ammount of CDs, I think one CD is best. I installed fedora with two CDs and it really didnt install much different things then ubuntu. I think ubuntu does have a DVD version with alot of packages on it, though I might be wrong.