Hang out at UNITAR workstation

UPDATED(28/11/2005)

UNITAR have “deprecated” the use of Fedora Linux in the workstation. The machine have been replaced by Windows XP.

It’s a boring Sunday and I’m still haven’t recovered from my flu and cough.

Decided to hang out at my college workstation or lab or whatever they called it. Meet and have a little chat with some old friends and classmates. Going to the lab, maybe I can try their new implemented workstation management system known as Pharos Signup. But I guess it isn’t my day, there was no one at the technical counter since I haven’t registered my ID to use the new system.

My last hope was to use the Fedora Linux and I was suprised that no one was using any of the Fedora’s. And I sat down, logged in with the student password and again suprised how messy the desktop were. The panel bar have been colored red and there was unnessesary item added to the panel. Browsing to the home folder is like browsing into a Recycle Bin. I’ve decided to delete all those rubbish and gnome profile directory.

The machine is still Fedora Core 3, they haven’t upgraded to the latest and not so suprise the person who set up these machine didn’t make nesessary updates after finish installing. It was like 232 available updates . The default web browser is Mozilla Firefox PR 1. lol This is really serious. Since I didnt know the root/superuser password assign on these machine, I have to do some sort of “modification”. Their biggest mistake was they didn’t set any boot loader password.

Hack into UNITAR Fedora Core 3 Workstation Computer.

A simple modification that can lead to root access. (note : this machine using Grub)

Reboot the machine.
During 5 second boot timeout, Press any key to enter the main boot screen menu.
At the boot screen press e.
Go to the ‘kernel’ line and press e.
At the end of the kernel line add ’single’ without ‘ ‘. Then enter.
Then press b to boot.
wait for the # and smile.

If you are smart, don’t change the root password. Just add a new user with superuser privilege, sudoers or whatever. But if you are a dumbass please ignore.

These UNITAR technician are busy coming up with new lame ideas to restrict pc usage in workstation but they didn’t have any initiative to update or upgrade the computer operating system and software packages. Ok lah! I wanna continue reading, replying emails and play some flash games. :)