Terminal su - Have the new updates disabled this option?

Hello,
Thanks to the reply of a fellow member, I bought the Acer One. I am impressed and it has worked wonderfully for what I want it for. However, I have a problem. I have enable the advanced mode, but when I go though the steps to install VLC, the terminal asks me for my password... and doesn't accept it. I have changed the password about 5 times. Right now I have it with no numbers, always entered with the blue icon on EN, and it still doesn't accept it. Tried it with caps lock on and nothing. Tried the boot password, with and without caps lock on... nothing. Did the same with the other password that can be setup at boot, still nothing. Am I doing something wrong?

 

I have also tried it on the system/add remove software tab. It keeps asking for my password, until it takes me to the change password screen. There I change it, try again, and nothing happens.

 

How comes you suspect the new updates to be the cause? I have a similar problem here and it also coincides with the updates from August 5th (I think). In my case yum or pirut won't work. I can enter the root password and it's being accepted, but then just nothing happens. I can use the

Code:

su

command to log on as root in a terminal. I tried to do various things which need root privileges, such as editing files with vim editor in the /etc/ directory, everything seems to work besides:
- when I start yum as root in the terminal window, again nothing happens
- the same for starting pirut
- I can't kill processes as root using the kill command, however I can using

Code:

skill -KILL -p pid

-I can't change the su password. Although the password change dialog would tell me it did change the password, it doesn't. The only password still working is the old one. And here comes the link to your problem. Maybe it is the same problem, because your password doesn't get changed at all. Did you try your first password or all of your old passwords after a "successful" password change?

Did anyone else observe such a crippled "super user"? Any ideas what to do? I'd like to read log messages, but /var/log/messages and /var/log/message (why do we have two of them on Linpus Linux?) or /var/log/dmesg are pretty empty. Am I right that Linpus Linux doesn't do all the logging which I know from other Linuxes?

 

I tried the old password, but I also had a problem with that one. Even though I used a specific capitalization, Linpus would force me to enter it with caps lock (don't know why).

I recovere Linpus from the USB, set the password, and everything is fine now.

I assumed it was the updates because my Acer seems fine... with that exception. In the older posts (generally speaking) were people who were not familiar with Linux, and other users who were more familiar just told them a few tidbits and their A1s were up and running. No matter what I did, I couldn't get the su - command to work, so, since I downloaded every update that was available, I suppossed that could have been the only difference.

But you bring up a good point about the password. Maybe it just doesn't get changed at all and that's the real problem. Anyone else suffering this problem?

 

OK. I was able to help myself. But I have no idea what I did. After searching the web for hours and hours I found a discussion in a Fedora developers' mailing list about some problems with yum which I didn't understand at all. However, they suggested to use

Code:

rm -f /var/lib/rpm/__db*

Allright. I know what the command does, but I didn't know what the __db* files would contain. Nevertheless, desperate as I was, I removed the files as suggested. The next step following that discussion which I didn't understand was to run

Code:

rpmdb --rebuilddb -vv

I did that too. As far as I understood, none of the following messages printed to the terminal window was a serious error message. But after running rpmdb, the __db* files were still missing in /var/lib/rpm.

Since then - what a great surprise - all my problems described above seem to be fixed. Yum and pirut are working again. This is a great relief, as I didn't want to recover Linpus Linux from scratch (too much software installed already, would take too long...).

Is there any expert around here who could explain me please what I did? I'm still concerned if I caused some other damage with this (still didn't dare to reboot).

 

ok, I am a noob.

Itried your commands and got the following:
[user@localhost ~]$ rm -f /var/lib/rpm/_db*
[user@localhost ~]$ rpmdb --rebuilddb -vv
error: can't create transaction lock on /var/lib/rpm/__db.000
D: May free Score board((nil))
[user@localhost ~]$
[user@localhost ~]$


what went wrong?

 

You were logged in as user, you didn't have superuser privileges. I guess that went wrong. Was your problem the same as the described one?