HD Install :: Root password retention

This is a weird problem: I have lilo.conf opened in beaver (I am root), and I click in the text, and the file appears to be read only. I go edit>>toggle readonly mode and beaver reads out:

Quote

Readonly mode cannot be toggled: "lilo.conf" is write protected

What is going on here?

The filesystem on which frugal DSL is installed is read-only, as if it were a cd. In grub it would be easy enough to get around this by editing its boot parameters at runtime. I don't believe you can do this with Lilo, though, so you might need to boot a live cd, mount the DSL partition, and edit the file from there.

There's probably a simpler solution, but I'm sorry I don't know what it is.

So, I reinstalled with grub.

Now about those boot time run parameters...how does that go? Could you hum a few bars? ;-)

the menu.lst file should be located at /cdrom/boot/menu.lst (or maybe it's /cdrom/boot/grub/menu.lst? I'm not sure...i boot DSL from grub installed in another distro). This file is probably read-only by default, being on a read-only file system. You can mount it read-write in at least two ways....

1) If you're already in DSL, issue the mount command on that partition with the remount rw option:
mount /dev/something -o remount rw
I'm not positive that's the proper syntax...never had much reason to remount partitions myself.

2) If you're booting up DSL, wait until Grub displays options to boot, select the DSL system you want to boot (up/down arrow keys to select), press "e" to edit the DSL entry, select the kernel line, press "e" again to edit that line, add "dsl frugal" to the kernel line, press "Enter", then press "b" to boot with your change. This is a temporary change...it will not be there the next time you boot.

After the system boots up, you will hopefully have a writeable partition. Go to the menu.lst file, find the kernel line for DSL, and add "dsl home=something" as root (something=hda1 or hdb2 or whatever you have available). The next time you boot, the partition you specified with "something" should be used as your home.

Note that this will not work if "something" is the same partition as the one containing KNOPPIX unless you also use the "toram" boot option. I wouldn't recommend it with 96mb of ram.

Looks like that procedure succeeded in making menu.lst read/write! Yeah!

There appear to be a lot of "kernel line"s though. Here's what I'm seeing:

Quote

# This sets the default entry to boot.
# Remember that GRUB counts from 0, so 1 is the second entry.

default 0

# This sets the length of time in seconds that grub will wait for the user to select an OS
# before it boots the default on. I reccommend at least 15 seconds.

timeout 15

# Enter the entry for DSL here. Something like this.

title DSL
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal
initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

title DSL fb800x600
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=788 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal
initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

title DSL fb1024x768
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=791 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal
initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

title DSL fb1280x1024
kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=794 noacpi noapm nodma noscsi frugal
initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

#title DSL with toram, mydsl, restore, hostname, and passwords
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi frugal dma toram mydsl=hda5 restore=hda5 host=DSL1 secure
#initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

#title DSL with XFree86
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi frugal dma toram mydsl=hda5/xfree restore=hda6 host=DSL1 secure
#initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

#title DSL with mydsl, restore, persistentancy, hostname, and passwords
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi frugal dma toram mydsl=hda3 restore=hda3 home=hda3 opt=hda3 host=DSL1 secure
#initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

#title DSL Runlevel 2
#kernel /boot/linux24 root=/dev/hda1 quiet vga=normal noacpi noapm noscsi nodma frugal 2 base norestore
#initrd /boot/minirt24.gz

#title Windows
#root (hd0,0)
#chainloader +1
#makeactive
#boot

At this point though, I have to wonder, would all the stuff I'm trying to do be accomplished if I simply did a debian type install with DSL or with real-life KNOPPIX? This seems like a lot of work to turn off the delete everything at reboot feature.

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