Help with Fedora

[Starshine]

I recently dug out an older computer and found it still has Fedora Core 4 on it. The problem? It asks for a username / password and I don't remember what it is.

Is there a way to bypass this to login?

[HomerJ]

This may not be the best way, but what I would do:

1)Boot any linux livecd.
2)chroot into fedora install.

mkdir /mnt/fedora
mount /dev/hda1 /mnt/fedora #replace hda1 with the root partition for fedora
chroot /mnt/fedora /bin/bash
env-update # may not be necessary
passwd #change the password for root

3) reboot, using the new password for root. You can use that account to set up passwords for other users by running `passwd username`

Hope this helps, there may be more involved in step 2 if there is some complexity to the setup.

[GamingX]

Did you try the username as root? Don't use a password, if it still asks for a password just put root.

[Starshine]

HomerJ --> Okay. Now I just need a LiveCD.

GamingX --> I tried Root, root and admin. With and without passwords. Neither worked.

[HomerJ]

HomerJ --> Okay. Now I just need a LiveCD.

GamingX --> I tried Root, root and admin. With and without passwords. Neither worked.

You could try knoppix or if you are looking for something smaller, you could check out the gentoo minimal CD. It is only 57.2 MB on x86 (likely the architecture you would be on an old PC). It has no GUI, however. If you have the install CD for the FC4 you have installed, you could probably use that as a liveCD (just exit to a rescue shell or whatever it offers).

Of course, FC4 is pretty old, you may just want to install the latest version. Otherwise you will be stuck with outdated software.

To find out the root user's name, you could run check in /etc/passwd. It will be the entry that says name:x:0:0. name will most likely be root, but I think some people change it.