Re: Login on Fedora 17

On Thu, 2012-04-12 at 08:02 +0900, Joel Rees wrote: > On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Mark Haney <markh(a)abemblem.com&gt; wrote: > > On 04/11/2012 10:34 AM, Paul W. Frields wrote: > > > >> > >> You can still login at this prompt with your 'root' account and > >> password.  From that point, you can look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log to see > >> what happened that caused your X Window System to fail.  If you want > >> to post that for people here to look at and offer advice, please > >> *don't* attach the file to your email.  It will probably be too big > >> and your message won't come through.  Instead, post it somewhere like > >> http://fpaste.org and send a link to your paste here. > >> > > > > > > That's true it is a fairly generic question, however, the OP did state he'd > > tried to login with root and failed.  Sounds to me like X wasn't the only > > thing that is having issues. > > > > Although it could be the password he used.  I noticed one time that the > > password I was using simply wouldn't work on the initial install of Fedora > > no matter how many times I installed it.  It did work however after changing > > it once I got it installed. > > Maybe keyboard definition issues? > > My hardware tends to be Japanese, and sometimes the difference in key > positions has left me with a root password set assuming US English > layout. Some of the punctuation keys move when the full system boots > and the keyboard definition is correctly set. If I work out what moved > where, I can log in. > > But sometimes it's easier to just boot single user and set the > password again. (Don't have all the layouts memorized.) > > Lately, I am beginning to doubt the wisdom of always hiding the > password when you're setting it, especially now that proper passwords > are generally understood to be long and convoluted. It would sometimes > be nice to have a "Debug keyboard" or "I've checked, nobody's looking > over my shoulder, and I need to see what I'm typing." button. > > Setting up a new system is, statistically speaking, sometimes going to > require some debugging until we can put the WINTEL-pseudo-standard > infected hardware behind us. (And I don't even see Apple trying to do > that, now.) > > Of course, you can always try the keys that might have moved -- > ()[]{}"'=;:+*-_\| and so forth -- where you'd type a user name. You > often have to think in reverse, of course, as in, "I thought I was > typing left-bracket, what would that have been?" Note that we actually have a test case which is run during validation testing and is intended to ensure that the same keyboard layout is used for setting passwords during installation and entering them post-install, because we had a lot of this kind of trouble back before we did that. To my knowledge we haven't had a major bug of this type since F15 or so.