Its not common, I doubt any modern popular distros are shipped this way.

I have never seen a writeable /etc/passwd in practice, but if I did then changing UID is effective for privilege...

Reading the spec (its a little ambiguous) the user has rwx on the /etc/passwd file.

The execute on the shadow is a red herring.

I would lay down the priv escalation pwnage by editing the...

I didn't mind the repeat rate, but the delay before repeating irritated me

Try kbdrate -d 500 and see how you get on.

Great work, I am pleased with the decision to move to ubuntu.

I would love to see a PAE kernel used since this can address greater amounts of RAM i.e 4GB+

Typically I install ubuntu desktop...