Login on Fedora 17

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 12:06 AM, Mark Haney <markh at abemblem.com> 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?"

--
Joel Rees