8.10 Password problem? Character set?

[EricFC]

I just did an upgrade of my old laptop from 8.04 to 8.10 using unetbootin. When I re-booted and attempted to login, I couldn't. Apparently an invalid username/password. I thought I had remembered the password I entered during the upgrade but I figured maybe with everything going on (upgrading multiple machines) either I forgot or fat-fingered it. So I rebooted into recovery, dropped into a root shell and changed the password - to the same one I thought I entered before. Restarted. Same problem. Tried it again. Same problem. Finally I changed to a different password - significant differences (as far as I can see) were that the new password was 6 characters instead of 13 characters and the new password did not contain a { or } or ~. And the new password worked fine. I have used passwords 13 characters long and containing {} and ~ on Hardy - is there something new in Intrepid that won't permit the use of these characters in a password?

Thanks,

Eric

[Redalert Commander]

It is possible that the upgrade removed the input device configuration from your Xorg config file, as was the case with me after enabling a proprietary driver from nvidia.
You can launch a console to check the config, when at the login, press Ctrl + Alt + F1 to bring up a console (or without the Ctrl.. but if I remember correctly you need the Ctrl there as well), you should be able to log in here.
open the config file using "sudo vi /etc/X11/xorg.conf" (or with another editor) and look for lines like:


Section "InputDevice"

# generated from default
Identifier "Keyboard0"
Driver "kbd"
Option "XkbRules" "xorg"
Option "XkbModel" "pc105"
Option "XkbLayout" "be"
Option "XkbOptions" "lv3:ralt_switch"
EndSection
Or the like, if present, make sure they are correct, especially the layout, I use a Belgian azerty keyboard, hence the 'be', if you use a US keyboard, I guess it should be us.
In the new file I got after the upgrade, the input devices are completely gone.

Also "sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg" might help, this command will reconfigure X. (I found this in the comments of the generated default config file.

Good luck

[EricFC]

Thanks RedAlert Commander. That's a possible lead.

I do recall something in the release notes about changes to the way the keyboard and mouse are handled in the new version of X.

Eric

[pwdm]

I upgraded to 8.10 (from Hardy Heron). My superuser password works fine on my account but not for other family members. That is, if I log in as my wife (say) and try to use sudo my superuser password fails. I tried the suggestion previously posted about looking at the keyboard set-up but without success. Suggestions?