Comment 0 for bug 150894

Revision history for this message
Anders Hall (kallebolle) wrote :

Often during dist upgrade, new releases and Gnome updates the language settings breaks password handling. Most often the keyboard resets to US English at login promt. Often it even resets the keyboard in session to English US even though the default language still is Swedish. This report mainly relate to the latest Gutsy release, though since version 5 (i think) this have happened frequently.

Use-case: I'm Swedish and use Swedish language as default and use a Swedish keyboard. During updates the keyboard is reset and hence my login password is not working. Changing session language don't help at login (most often it is not even setting language in session correctly).

Problem: At times it can be very hard to find the right keys if you use odd characters (and so on) and reasonably long passwords. Ive learned the English US keyboard thoug novel users have no idea what is the problem and the length it takes to access the computer can be very long (and cost money). If you use odd combinations like i do (Swedish/English computer/Swedish keyboard and several others keyboard languages as options) it can get really messy.

Severity: In some cases (not lately though, 2 years ago when it happened first) it is faster to reinstall Ubuntu than figuring how to put in the password. The target group for Ubuntu would probably scrap the project all togheter and would not bother to learn another keyboard setting (if they at all found the problem).

Solution: Add keyboard indicator at login promt and add language indicator at login promt. Most important inform responsible developers that this is a Security bug. The upgrade should be tested in more languages in this case. Also add keyboard and language indicator when screen saver activates if password is used.