I've tried to change the root password from the GUI with no success, I end up having to delete the passwd and shadow files on the flash drive. Using v5.0.5 with a cache drive, here's what I do, select users in the GUI, select root, type in new password twice click "change" a security login box comes up on Win7,  I enter root and new password and it doesn't take, after several attempts I'm locked out. Same thing on the terminal console. I tried "enter" on the password field as I had no password previously, but same result.

You must be able to change the root password in the GUI, but I can't.

Alrighty...figured it out for anyone else with this problem. I used a " in the new password and I'm guessing it's not cool to do that as a password with no punctuations worked just fine. Must be a Linux thing, though I haven't seen it documented anywhere,  it's early days for me down the Linux rabbit hole.

good summary here:

http://www.cyberciti.biz/faq/linuxunix-rules-for-naming-file-and-directory-names/

But they don't point out that "putting things in quotes" changes them from 'many tokens' to 'one token'.

Double and single quotes are used to FORCE multiple words into a single argument.