Comments by "" (@dingokidneys) on "OpenKylin: China's First "Independent" Linux Distro" video.

I'd love to see a Wireshark analysis of this distro.
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The only issue, and it's a small one, is that they state that they built it from the ground up, which they obviously did not. Other distros generally give credit to the upstream - "Based on Ubuntu/Debian/Arch" whatever. Mint do this explicitly on their website and I think within other documentation on their distro.
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That was immediately what I thought as well though I guess you could allocate a partition then delete when all partitioning is done which might leave a block of disk that you could hide stuff in. It didn't look like there was any significant amount of space missing from allocated partitions however so that's just paranoia on my part. 🥸
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Nevertheless, you made me think about just how I'd verify if this was a problem and how I'd get around it if an unknown password was set there. I may well be wrong but I'd try booting from recovery media and then copying the password hash from a known account into the hash field of /etc/shadow. That or copy the whole root entry from an unlocked, password set root account on another system into this /etc/shadow. Maybe it'd work; maybe it'll bork your system completely but it sounds like something I want to try out.
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@BrodieRobertson I wouldn't have bothered to edit it. Your pinned comment is quite enough in my view and the original bit made me stop and think which is always a useful thing to do.
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@BrodieRobertson Can you just restore the original? I like this video. Could you add a text overlay at the /etc/passwd point saying "Got it wrong - see comments"?
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@bsahin7110 OK, just tried single user. This does not work. If the root account is locked, the system won't open a terminal; password or no. If the root account is unlocked and a password exists, you get prompted for the password. Chroot also would not work as you are working with the running system credentials. If on the other hand you boot from SYSRESCD or Clonezilla or some such rescue disk, you are not using the system credentials and /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow are simply files with permissions that you can now bypass as the 'verified' root user of the rescue system.
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Oooh yeah baby!! I've got to give that a try! That would be hilarious. I'll set my timezone as Beijing and my user name as Xi Jinping.
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