Hi, I have a project called ediX which is just a minimized Debian for educational hosting. It is always under heavy redesign but especially so right now with all of the changes to the Debian Jessie. I recently took down the web site in order to move it the project to The Foundation for Learning Equality where I also help with educational projects such as Khan Academy Light etc.
After reflecting on the question longer the thought finally occurred to me why others might want or need this second password feature. ediX is basically default Debian live with a few select packages for a minimum boot relying on the persistence feature to provide educational software for services and configuration. The users (teachers) are assumed to not have shell / linux knowledge and a minimal GUI is made available basically just for monitoring, changing configurations, and updates. However, tails users running directly from a live CD without using persistence do not benefit from having the users credentials saved and thus the need if I am understanding things correctly. What I would like to see is an easier method of changing the default password and other user settings in the Debian live configuration scripts. As a simple precaution I have been changing user name but allowing live as password for the image however this all gets changed once the persistence volume is loaded. As I understand it, Debian Live recommends and defaults to user / live for the user account credentials and recommends user-setup and sudo packages be installed in the packages-list providing those features. By adding those packages that account is created and there are supporting scripts for changing the default user name and password however I have not had a need to do so. Hope this helps! Thanks, On Thu Jan 01 2015 at 4:53:33 AM sajolida <[email protected]> wrote: > Ed Dixon: > > Hi, > > Hi, which project are you from? > > > I have been using the xtrlock package which allows the screen to still be > > viewed while locked to good effect in classroom situations. It takes the > > current users password by default. I may be missing something here but as > > far as I am aware all current Debian screen locking mechanisms fill this > > need, if installed. I personally would not want a second set of > credentials > > adding a potential vector attached to the user account just to have a > > separate password for the screen lock. Can you explain more the need for > > this? > > In the case of live distributions most of the time there is no user > password by default. So if we want to use a password to lock the screen > we need to ask for a password at some point. > > I'd like to avoid introducing yet another password if there is one > already (like in the case of Jondo, and sometimes Tails) but otherwise > we need at least one. > > Does that make sense? > > Note that in the case of Tails, you can configure an administration > password at boot time: > https://tails.boum.org/doc/first_steps/startup_options/ > administration_password. > I'd like to consider reusing this for screen locking if it is set (and > only ask for a screen locking password if there is none), unless someone > has security concerns about this. > > -- > sajolida >
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