Quirkiness on Debian Lenny PPC 5.0.6 install

While trying to install debian from a DVD on an old 12" iBook G4 PPC, ran into an error during the install, but it let me complete and went on my merry way. Of course, when it came back up, Gnome didn't work, which was easily enough resolved by going to /etc/x11/x11.conf and commenting out the items in the 'display' section that deal with framebuffers. Then going to /etc/init.d and going ./gdm start fired up Gnome successfully.

What I kept coming into an issue with was with having to change my password - which I thought was odd, every time that I logged on as any user! It said that the password must be reset. I thought it might be a setting in users, and unfortunately logging into gnome as root is disabled by default, and the password thing kept me from being able to use the 'elevation' - the answer was to do some searching and look online. Hopping down into the console as root, edit /etc/gdm/gdm.conf - you need to add:

AllowRoot=True in the [Security] section.

With that, I was able to log in, but again it asked for a password change and there was nothing in the user options to keep forcing that. More looking showed that it was the TIME - the laptop had been off for so long that the time had reset, and apparently if the time is back to 1970 that's the behavior - it forces a password change. And because I hadn't yet corrected that, it kept happening. You learn something new every day :-)