>     There appears to be no root password in the xfce image. There's only an
>     asterisk in /etc/shadow.

Maybe my mistake, there was meant to be. However <sudo su> should work
(from where you can set a root password if wanted) That's the usual
debian-live type setup anyway.

For anyone interested in the TDE image, it's worth noting that TDE is
fully functional without many of the gtk-orientated packages which had
to be recompiled (consolekit, policykit udisks2 et al) Also TDE does not
need GTK nor QT4.