I was just at the codex.wordpress.com wordpress support site about manually resetting a password. They had some long drawn out procedure involving a text file and the md5 command to create the md5 sum of a password in the file. My Ubuntu 12.04 server did not have the md5 command line tool and as it turns out, it’s not necessary. MySQL has the md5 function built in. So to manually reset a password where you have direct access to the database you simply use the following commands.
USE wordpressdatabase;
UPDATE wp-user SET wp-pass = MD5('some_password_you_have_chosen') where wp-user = 'the_wordpress_user_name';
That’s it.