Login on Fedora 17

[Joel Rees]

On Thu, Apr 12, 2012 at 8:40 AM, Joe Zeff <joe at zeff.us> wrote:
> On 04/11/2012 04:02 PM, Joel Rees wrote:
>>
>> 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?"
>
>
> I don't know if it's practical, but you might be able to print out a
> cheat-sheet showing what character maps to what key, possibly from a
> different computer.  If so, you could use that to get the password in
> correctly that one time.

Yeah, if I have another Fedora system handy, I can often nose around
in the X11 setings and other places and get the keyboard definitions
up on a screen.

But, since I know which keys tend to move, it's usually just much
faster to type the password in the wrong place. (I didn't say that
very clearly the first time, did I?)

In other words, where the system prompts for the user name/id, type
the password, instead, and see what actually gets typed in.

(Resisting the habit of hitting the enter key will save some time. If
you're doing this sort of thing for remote login, you never want to
hit enter when you've done this, of course.)

(Especially, if you are doing this kind of thing on a web page
password form, don't hit enter with the password in the user field. If
you do, you want to be able to clear the browser's memory of what you
typed in, or your password becomes visible to a lot of people.)

Or, when someone might be watching, just type the parts that might
have moved. (That would usually be just certain punctuation keys.) Or
type a few characters at a time. You usually don't have to type the
whole password to figure out which keys got moved, or even just see
that keys got moved, so you know you want to fix the password.

If you're not familiar with which keys moved, then, yeah, you may want
to have another system handy for checking what keys are supposed to be
where in the default keyboard map. The first few times take a bit of
effort, which is why it's often quicker to just boot single and fix
the password.

--
Joel Rees