Comment by Johnny_Brahms
10 years ago
I have had something similar bite me, although mine was easily fixed. I used swedish (åäö) characters for my disk encryption password. This worked fine, until I did a dist-upgrade and had my boot keyboard reset to US QWERTY (using a custom swedish version of capewell-dvorak).
The solution for me was to stick on LTS distros.
A quote from the Slackware README_CTYPT.txt
"NOTE: if you use a non-US keyboard and need to enter a passphrase during boot, this may be problematic if the keyboard mapping is US while Slackware runs from the initrd filesystem. In this case, add support for your keyboard to the initrd image using this additional parameter to the 'mkinitrd' command above: "-l <language>". The string <language> is the same as the one you select in the installer when your keyboard is non-US. Example for a dutch keyboard: "-l nl"."
Now I'm warned that other systems that use automated kernel updates may clobber the keyboard choice for the initrd.
"May" as in "most certainly did", at least when you are lazy like me and use a GUI-centered distro.
I ended up plugging the harddrive into another computer and fixing it from there.
I never got that shit from slackware...
Slackware don't do shit.
In fact, Slackware don't do anything unless it's told, which is not as bad a thing as it may seem.
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I have to input a different keyboard when logging in through sddm vs. when using sudo, due to sddm refusing to accept non-US locales.
I have that one when running init 4 but the encryption pass phrase is before that stage of the boot up the way my laptop is set up. I'll remember that though...
So I looked up SDDM, because I'd never heard of it, and when I found it what it was (and saw its bug list) I laughed and laughed.
https://www.jwz.org/doc/cadt.html
Nothing changes.
A similar problem is having a UK pound sign (£) or double quotes (") in your password. These are mapped differently in UK and US keyboards, and £ is sometimes not easily available at all.
You can still write åäö with the numpad if your keyboard has one.
Alt + 134 = å
I tried that. The LUKS password screen did not support it.
LUKS does not really have a password screen. It must have been your X-window session or terminal emulator that did not support it. LUKS can handle it!
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Incorrect. Linux does not support alt codes.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alt_code
I'm pretty sure the standard US layout offers more than enough symbols to write an excellent password.
I tend to prefer extremely long passwords/phrases over things that require stupid characters (had trouble with WiFi keys using the French "é" back in 2008, all my passwords are ASCII since)
Of course, characters that I use in my everyday language aren't "stupid" to me.
Even my name contains that "stupid" character :)
Although I have to agree with him I wouldn't use it in a Wifi password either.
That makes me wonder - how long before someone manages to put an emoji in their legal name?
Every language that is not American English is "stupid"?
No diacritics in Latin, either!
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It was a long password phrase. One of the words just happened to be in my mother tongue.
I'm baffled that the standard US keyboard layout doesn't even have the ° character, something I use all the time.
I think we typically get around this by writing things like "122 degrees", "50C", "122F", etc. in informal settings.
It does have that character. Press Option-Shift-8.
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You only need access to two symbols to be able to write an excellent password. But that doesn't mean it would be reasonable to, for example, restrict a password to only allow 1 and 0.
I had to use a system once that accepted the "stupid characters" ( and ) in the password on account creation, but not on login...