webbookblog

Any IT helpdesk worker will tell you that the most common issue they deal with on a Monday morning is users who have forgotten their passwords over the weekend. So what do you do when you forget your password and can’t log on to your webbook? (or for that matter another user of your webbook forgets their password) Don’t worry, all is not lost, and this is a great time to introduce you to the recovery console.

When your webbook switches on you will see the webbook logo for a second or two as the BIOS gets ready to start up the system. Just after this, hit the escape key and you should end up at a menu like this:

Don’t worry if you miss it, just switch off and try again.

Go down to the second option in the list, this should end with (recovery mode) and press return.

You will then be treated to lots of weird and wonderful messages flying past as you see it boot up. Those messages are normally hidden by the Ubuntu startup screen.

Eventually you end up at this blue screen (not a blue screen of death, but a blue screen of salvation!)

Select the option to “Drop to a root shell prompt”

At the bottom of the screen you should see a little # prompt and a flashing cursor. You are now at a command line with superuser powers. Try typing

ls /home

this should give you a list of people with home directories. Lets say one of them is “alan”. To change the password for this user type

passwd alan

and provide a new password.

Once you are happy that you have a username and password that you can use type

exit

to continue starting up the webbook, you can then log in with your new password.

Other commands you might want to use at the recovery console include

deluser –remove-home alan

this deletes the user called alan, plus the home directory and all contents. Use with caution!

oem-config-prepare

Once you have deleted all the users you can run this command to reset the webbook to the first user wizard. This means that the next time it is turned on it will ask for a username and location etc. You might want to do this if you are giving your webbook to someone else.

So you have your webbook set up and you can log on to it. But what about the rest of the family? Can they use it too? Of course they can, but we don’t want them logging on with your username and password, we don’t want them messing up your stuff!

From the menu at the top of the screen go to System-Administration-Users and Groups

and up pops the dialog below:

Note how most of the buttons are grey and inactive. This is because adding users is something that requires administrator privileges (also called root privileges). As you are the first user you do have these powers, but you have to press the “Unlock” button at the bottom to give yourself the extra privileges.

Whenever you see this screen you should remember the words of the great philosopher, Peter Parker’s Uncle Ben: “With great power comes great responsibility”

After you put in your password all the buttons will activate and you can press the “Add User” button and fill in the form below:

now a new problem becomes apparent, you can’t see the bottom of the form! This is because the form was designed for a screen measuring 1024×768 pixels, but your webbook has a screensize of 1024×600. Those last 168 pixels do make a bit of a difference sometimes. Your first instinct might be to grab the title bar with the mouse and pull it upwards, that helps a bit, but you can’t push the top of the window beyond the top of the screen that way, so I will have to show you a new trick. Hold down the Alt key on the keyboard, then click and drag anywhere on the window you want to move and you will find that your mouse cursor turns to a fist as you pick up the window and move it. This will allow you to move the window so that the title bar is off screen at the top, and you can see the buttons at the bottom.

There are a few places where you might encounter overly tall windows, another notable one is when setting up a new email account with Evolution so this is a good trick to get the hang of.

As you set up users for your family and friends, if you set their profile as “Desktop user” then they won’t be able to do anything that would damage the webbook or mess with the settings of your other users.