tracha,

Thank you for using the Dell Community Forum.

This is for security reasons in Ubuntu. When you first setup Ubuntu on this system it ask you to input a username and password. Dell does not add a password to any systems it ships out. If you cannot remember the password you will have to reinstall Ubuntu.

Don't reinstall Ubuntu to change the root password ... boot into single user mode and change the password...that is what single user mode is for (among other things):

Boot Ubuntu and when you get to the grub screen (the screen that has the countdown and shows the kernels) hit any key to interrupt it

Then hit the "A" key on the keyboard to append to the end of the selected kernel line and add a "1"

The kernel line looks something like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64 ro root=UUID=f1927a4e-b8b0-40c1-b242-ba91208fed3f rhgb quiet

It should then look like this:

kernel /vmlinuz-2.6.27.12-170.2.5.fc10.x86_64 ro root=UUID=f1927a4e-b8b0-40c1-b242-ba91208fed3f rhgb quiet 1

and hit ENTER once you typed the number 1 at the end

This will bring you into single user mode

Once the terminal prompt appears type: passwd

and change your password

you can then reboot, or just type: init 5

That will bring you back into an X-windows environment

Reinstallation is like using a pile driver to hammer in a Brad

FYI in Ubuntu I think you can even just open a terminal and type:

sudo passwd

then change it and go from there, give that a try first before trying the single-user-mode solution, I am a Fedora user so the whole default sudo setup on ubuntu boggles my mind sometimes as it just introduces four more characters to setup ... if you don't have multiple users requiring access to applications or files owned by root whats the point.

isn't access to single user mode via GRUB done by adding: Single at the end and not 1?