One of the 'design features' of newUI is that there's no root password step. As I understand it, this was designed this way on the basis that the user should create an 'admin user' during firstboot, a bit Ubuntu-style; I guess the idea is that in general you don't have to use the root account directly, and if you want to do so you can manually set up a root account password with the admin user's privileges.

This is a major change in how the whole distro functions, really, so people may spot other issues with it. But there's one that's clear already: you can't actually rely on firstboot always being run post-install. There are various supported package sets which do not include firstboot. Especially, we don't have a text firstboot any more (and when we did, it didn't actually include account creation), so any non-graphical install will be entirely inaccessible, because it just boots straight to a login tty and you have no account to log in with. You'd have to boot rescue mode or boot a live image and chroot into the installed system, or something, to setup a password for root before you could login directly.

This design needs further thought. The simplest approach, clearly, would be just to go back to requiring the user to set a root password during installation. Given that we're past feature freeze and Alpha freeze, and we're almost certainly going to be drowning in other bugs during the rest of the F18 stabilization cycle, might it be prudent just to go ahead and do that, and save the 'new approach' for F19?