Comment 20 for bug 579876

This happened to me in 14.04 when a key broke on my portable. I first messed up by using passwd in terminal since it is the more common command (historically) and then I noticed the home directory still used the old password as described in this old bug. After a recovery (replace shadow and passwd files with older versions) I figured I had to use the built in unity gui for changing the password. However, as Mike noted it only changes the login password (separate but related bug). Useless!