Lo and behold, mere mortals, as I bring to you the salvation you have long sought. After what felt like an eternity (more like a couple hours over a few days) of arduous (more like rather relaxed) scripting on my N900, I bring you, (cue holy music) recoverlock.

I'll make a proper announcement thread when I get around to throwing this in the repositories and do my best to promote it to extras (since the people least likely to learn how to do what this thread teaches are less likely to use extras-devel anyway. Maybe I'll even add an icon that people can click instead.

Install the deb, if you get dependency errors, install "rootsh" and "john" from the repos. Then run the command recoverlock from the command line (NOT as root, eventually I'll probably add a check that intelligitently checks if it's being run as root or not, but for now it pipes everything to sudo gainroot anyway, which seems to have problems if called by root). Wait a little, and if nothing is particularly wrong with your system, you should have your lock code eventually.

Edit: Also, it is my intent to eventually add a handful of command-like options (one to save the log, one to save the password in the main john.pot, one where the JtR output isn't suppressed, whatever else is needed). Maybe some day, I would wrap this up in some sort of GUI are well, although I don't think there's really much point in going that far.