Hello

First thanks for a beautiful operating system. First time exploring any flavour of Linux and it has been a joy. I am having problems with log in and users though.

I am using grafpup 2.00 rc 1 on a Dell D505 laptop 512 ram

The black terminal screen for entering a password is not accepting keyboard entries apart from return! All other keyboard entries are fine. New users do not therefore have passwords but also can't login with a blank password. New users do have folders created in /home
After I have tried to change passwords / add user I have sometimes then not been able to log as anyone. The log in screen takes the name / password and then returns back to the log in screen!! This has happened to root login even when I have not tried to change root's password. A little frustrating as this means that have to power the laptop off and delete graf_save.2fs and start again.

A simple solution is not to change passwords but this rather takes away the point of having them!

Any ideas would be welcome!

OK, when you type in your password the typing is hidden, but that does not mean that it is not being read. This is a standard feature of the "passwd" utility which comes with just about every version of Linux (or any Unix for that matter). The bug you are experiencing could be caused by a bug in the login manager, or by a bug in my usermanager script. I have had a couple reports of people having to log in twice from the Slim login manager, and I wonder if possibly that is what you are experiencing?

Anyway, I've read your comments and I do care about getting you up and running here. I'll investigate and take any action neccessary to fix things if they need fixing.

Nathan

OK, let me go a step further with my reply. If you open the file /etc/shadow you will see a list of users and a bunch of cryptic information about them. Each line will start with the users name, followed by a colon (, and if they have a password there will be an encrypted string next, basically a bunch of seemingly random numbers and letters. And then there will be another colon, delineating the end of the password field.

A user without a valid password will show up as their user name followed by two colons, or foloowed by a colon, and exclamation point, and another colon, or possibly a colon followed by a star (*) and then another colon. So by checking that file you can determine if they indeed have a password.

I might add that depending on how you add a user you can screw things up yourself. If you just use the "adduser" command in a terminal then the user will have no configuration files in their new home directory. My graphical user manager will copy the basic configuration from /etc/skel to their home directory. Without certain files like .Xinitrc (which is hidden) the user will not be able to get the graphical interface to start.

I've gone through the code and the gui works fine for me under all circumstances (even though it's a bit ugly looking) so if you didn't use that I'd suggest you do.

Nathan

Thanks for invisible typing hint!!
I'll check the /etc/shadow file.
I was using the graphical user manager.

Support much appreciated

Hi

Log in problems have returned.
This time I can see no changes in adding users/ changing passwords from me
New usb stick install of dilo grafpup 2.0 Installed toolkit of software (all standard packages - abiword, gnmeric, firefox etc) through grafpup package manager under root. Latest patch applied.
Next boot attempt to log in as grafpup resulted in log in failure and return to log in screen. Log in as root succesful. Create new user led to same problem.
Checked here and nothing obvious.
Help please. Grafpup, for me at any rate, is feeling a little unstable in the login area.

Cheers