It happens to everyone. You have so many usernames and passwords that you can't remember them all. Fortunately, Facebook, Gmail, and about a billion other online services have a "forgot password" link. Just click it and the web service will either email your password to you or allow you to reset it and enter a new one. But what happens when you forget the password for your operating system. While you might think the easiest thing to do is reinstall Ubuntu, (after all, this is a clean install so it's not like we'd be losing any data on our hypothetical system), you can save yourself 15-30 minutes by changing the password.
It turns out you don't have login to change your password. As we discovered thanks to a useful post on the Ubuntu forums, you can do it from the bootloader screen. Check out the 5 easy steps after the jump. 1. Turn on your computer, and as soon as you the Press Esc to enter grub message, press the escape key. 2. Select the option that says (recovery mode). 3. Your PC will boot into a shell. Once you get a command prompt, type passwd username where the username is your username. If you can't remember this, then you can type ls /home which should bring it up. 4. Enter a new password when prompted, and again when prompted again 5. Type shutdown -r now to reboot your system. That's it. You should now be able to login with your shiny new password.
