What does locking the root password do?

[StevenR]

I don’t think I’ll be satisfied until after I know how to do a complete wipe and reload of the OS. To get good at anything, you need to take risks and to occasionally break things. If I damage the OS on my Librem 5 (and I am sure I will), how difficult is it to do a factory reset and start over?.

[twrightsman]

I don’t want to derail this topic, but you can see the docs here (https://developer.puri.sm/Librem5/Development_Environment/Phone/Troubleshooting/Reflashing_the_Phone.html) to learn how to reset/reflash your phone. It is not necessarily beginner-friendly though, fair warning.

[Jt0]

For reference, I was able to unlock the root password in the QEMU image:

QEMU root password

I might just be missing this part of the documentation, but I’d like to use a shell as the root user in the Librem 5 QEMU image using the most recent version uploaded (build 4204) and can’t figure out how to become root. I’ve searched the documentation and the forum and can’t seem to find it anywhere, and “123456” doesn’t work. What’s the password?

[eNZymOrTHe]

@StevenR

how difficult is it to do a factory reset and start over?.

Not difficult at all, if it is anything like Pinephone. Tomorrow morning I get to install the os for the third time in as many days; tor browser keeps crashing it so it looks like no tor browser on mobian for me.

[tracy]

I always wondered at the mechanism how some distros have you set the root password at install time and others don’t. Now I know.