Finally I rooted my Nook Color

I installed CyanogenMod 7.0.3 using these instructions.

Half-baked ideas: random root passwords for VMs

For more half-baked ideas, see my “ideas” tag.

This is an easy idea to simplify Fedora installations.

When anaconda detects it is running inside a VM, instead of asking the user for a root password, it just creates a completely random root password. This password gets written to a local file during the install.

Now you can’t log into a VM easily if you don’t know the root password. But, you can read files out of the VM using virt-cat. So on the host there is a “ssh as root” script which grabs the random root password out of the guest and lets you log in without knowing or needing to know the root password.