So glad I could help.

(btw sorry if I take a while to approve comments, all first time comments go through me and I was away for the weekend.)

Regards.

Q

I had ther same problem with Nicola but it worked for me with the “sudo su” command. When you type the new passwd the screen does not show the characters but they are typed-in. Thank you Quintin!

This will be a bit tougher to get done since you will need:

1) A USB Flash Drive.
2) Another Computer with Internet.

Right, using your other computer listed in (2) download puppylinux and burn the ISO to a CD.

On this computer, boot from the CD. Puppylinux asks a few questions before you are in the user interface. Then, insert your flashdrive (1) in this computer and install puppylinux to the flash drive. It takes some reading of every step, but if you READ and work properly through the menu’s you should get it right first try.

Now, go to your Aspire One, and boot. Hold down the DEL (delete) key and in the BIOS set the laptop to boot from USB. The menu should say something like “Boot” or “Boot device order”

Move the USB drive to the top of the menu, save and exit, and then reboot with the USB key in the laptop.

It should boot from the USB key and you will go through the now familiar Puppy Linux startup.

Now, once you have booted into Puppy, access the Acer’s harddrive (it should show as an Icon in the bottom left of the screen) and brows to the folder called “ETC”

In ETC there is a file called “shadow” open this file and there you will see a line that starts with root.

Copy this line and insert it below itself so that you now have two of them.

Put an “x” in front of the first one so that it now starts with “xroot” and then in the second line delete all the characters BETWEEN the first two colons (:) (There will be a lot of characters that usually start with $) DO NOT DELETE ANY OF THE COLONS!

Once done, save the file and reboot without the USB key in the laptop.

Your ROOT password should now be blank.

This is a bit harder than what is normally expected from an end user, so I advise you to either get a tech savvy friend to assist – but if you feel game, go for it by all means and tread carefully.

Hope you come right!

Regards

Q

I googled a bit and depending on where you bought yours it might come with a root password or not.

Here are a few possible scenarios:

Did you set up a user password with which to log in? If that is the case, try that password when you try and install flash.

Instead of simply typing “su” try typing “sudo su” and see if it still prompts for a password.

Depending on where you bought yours you could, if all else fails, contact the shop or vendor and see if they maybe can give you the root password or assist you.

Hope you get sorted!

Regards

Q

I don’t have one around right now to check but if you are not afraid of tooling around you could try a blank password, or you could try and reset the root password.

Resetting the root password is tricky for new users.

Press alt and f2 at the same time. A dialogue will pop up where you can type in a program name and hit enter. The program name is xterm. After typing xterm and pressing enter a terminal window will pop up.

In the terminal type the following commands: (In all cases do not type the quotation marks)

Type “su” and press enter. After a new line appears type “passwd root”

You will then get a dialog along the lynes of TYPE NEW PASSWORD FOR ROOT:

Type in a chosen password (keep it simple for now, you don’t want to forget it), if a message appears “bad password based on a dictionary word” you can safely ignore it. You will be asked to enter the same password again.

After the second time that you typed in the new password a message along the lines of PASSWORD SUCCESSFULLY CHANGED FOR USER ROOT will appear.

You can then type “exit” and press enter. The terminal should then close. You can then try and install flash player again and use the password you entered in the terminal.

I hope it works!

Kind Regards

Q

I would suggest you trash Linpus entirely. It is just not worth the hassle.

I would also suggest you do not dual boot XP and another Linux on the Aspire One Linpus version. Your harddrive space is only 8gb, and WinXP will quickly gobble that up, and it will be even worse if you partition your harddrive, since XP will have even less space to play on.

If you DO decide to dual boot try this:

Get an external CD rom (USB) and boot with your XP disk from that. Install XP on a 4gb partition. Then get yourself a boot image of EasyPeasy Linux (an Ubuntu Variant) and install that via a USB flash drive (the image is around 2gb.)

You will be prompted by the auto installer to install XP and EasyPeasy side by side so it should go seamlessly.

After that you will have two installs to dual boot!

Take the effort to upgrade your Aspire with more ram though, the performance improvement is well worth the bucks spent, and with RAM so cheap it is a no-brainer.

Hope all goes well!

No I have not tried to mod mine. It was one I fixed up for a friend. Having looked at the Aspire One, I can say that modding it will be hard, but not impossible.

Let me know how it works out?