yowkee essential

It is plain beautiful — that’s my first impression to my iBook. The colours looks fine and fonts is just right…Yeah, RIGHT! I used to have high request for the font in the computer I used, I like the good looking and smooth fonts. It’s just not feeling right when I see ugly font in my computer, kind of paranoid of it.

Do I ever use Mac? Well, back to 10 years ago I remembered that’s one night I have to go to computer lab to do some homework. There wasn’t any PC available then I felt lucky to find a Mac. Without other choice then so I sit down and open photoshop to have a try — double-click->crash, open->crash.….then I gave up and left. So that’s the first experience. After that I have never touch a Mac machine except standing inside some Apple store, holding a mouse, looking at the beautiful screen and clicking here-n-there for one or two minutes. That’s all.

Ever since I thought it’s cool to have an Apple laptop, I finally bought one 2 years later.

It’s a second hand iBook G4. It run Mac OS X Panther. I don’t get the original OS CD, I don’t get the bag, oops…I don’t even know the administrator password!! The first thing I want to do is try to bring the softwares up-to-date. But I don’t have the Admin’s password in order to install software.

Did some google give me these links:

• Mac OS X recover lost root password
• A more detailed instruction to reboot and set root password

It’s either one of these ways:

1. If you are already logon as an admin, great, all you need to do is just type : sudo passwd root, then give the new password
2. If you got the original Mac OS X CD, just boot it up with the CD, and choose reset password
3. Follow the above link, it teach you to hold Command + S button on the OS rebooting, go into the plain old console mode, mounting file system and then: passwd root, give the new password, reboot. Done.

Well well well…good advice, when I saw all those links, I’ve been playing little smart to create a userid of my own and make it auto-login, then I ever rebooted it. Stupid me. So I don’t have a original OS CD, and…I have already login with the new account (no more the old and good admin — even though it isn’t my name). Okay I have the last choice, follow the instructions to boot up into console mode step by step, then “passwd root”. Nope, it didn’t work, it just quit and staring at me :(.

I have almost gave up after 30 minutes of trying, and then my UNIX mind ring a bell again :). I boot into the console mode, instead of changing the root’s password, I could change the sudoer!! So adding the new users into /etc/sudoer then reboot! Once rebooted my userid is some one who could su hahaha…that’s it, with “sudo passwd root” then I am done. Piece with the Mac OS X.