ibn Mas’ud

If you ever get locked out of your Ubuntu installation as I found myself to be tonight, you can reset your password quite easily using the following steps.

1. Power up your computer.
2. Press ESC at the grub menu.
3. Press e for edit.
4. Highlight the line that begins “Ubuntu, KERNEL ………” and press e.
5. Go to the end of this line, add rw init=/bin/bash and press enter.
6. Press b to boot your system.
7. Your system will boot up to a passwordless root shell.
8. Type in passwd username where username is the username you lost the password for.
9. Set your password.
10. Type in reboot.

That is it! you can now log in using your new password. You can even reset your root password here but cannot login with it at the login screen.

As of 8am this morning, T-Mobile seems to be having problems with their EDGE based T-Zones service. A call to T-Mobile’s customer service number confirmed this. They are said to be fixing the problem and hoping to get the service back up asap. No ETA was given.

If you are using a Windows Mobile phone you will get the “The remote party has terminated this connection” message.

UPDATE: The EDGE network is up and running as of sometime around 6:15pm.

Did you know there are alternate shortcuts to the commonly used cut (ctrl+x), copy (ctrl+c) and paste (ctrl+v) shortcuts?

Action	Shortcut	Alternate Shortcut
Cut	Ctrl+X	Del+Shift
Copy	Ctrl+C	Insert+Ctrl
Paste	Ctrl+V	Insert+Shift

These are kind of confusing so I’m sticking to the Ctrl+ shortcuts. For those who use different keyboard layouts like Dvorák the X, C and V keys are placed far apart and awkward to use. In such cases the alternate shortcuts maybe easier to use.