On Sat, Aug 15, 2015 at 11:54:06AM -0400, Steve Litt wrote:
> On Fri, 14 Aug 2015 22:25:06 -0700
> Isaac Dunham <ibid.ag@???> wrote:
>
> > On Fri, Aug 14, 2015 at 07:01:11AM -0400, Haines Brown wrote:
> > > The aim is to boot to a console prompt, log in as root, install
> > > xorg and fluxbox. That gives me X and a window manager but no
> > > desktop environment. At present I get a log in prompt and can log
> > > in as user in console, but for some reason root log in not working.
> > > I suppose that when I provided a password I mistyped.
> >
> > At the grub menu, edit the kernel commandline to change
> > "root=... ro ..." to "root=... rw ... init=/bin/bash"
> >
> > Then run "passwd", sync a couple times, and reboot.
> >
> > HTH,
> > Isaac Dunham
>
> Why change ro to rw?

"root=/dev/sda6 ro" means that when initrd (or the kernel) mounts
/dev/sda6, it mounts it read-only (ro).
Then the initscripts run fsck, and remount '/' as read-write (rw).

So if you don't change it to "rw", you will need to manually remount
/ so that it's writeable; I think this would be one way to do so:
mount -o remount,rw /

HTH,
Isaac Dunham