With 20.04, should there have been a more prettier window (as there is with Ubuntu 20.04) when entering a passphrase to unlock a encrypted drive to allow Lubuntu 20.04 OS to open successfully?
Also when setting up a clean new Lubuntu 20.04 install initially, I selected a UK keyboard installation with my full mbr disc encryption. The installation process looked successful until I ran into the issue where when asked to enter my passphrase on startup, I got only 1 attempt to enter a correct passphrase blindly via CLI. When entered incorrectly I got thrown into a “grub rescue” mode which I didn’t understand so I just held down the power button to perform a reboot try again and again.
Well your probably saying, “maybe enter in the correct password then”, ya duh, but the problem I discovered was the keyboard seems to be US rather than UK when entering a passphrase. When I used the specific US keyboard keys to re-enter the passphrase with certain special characters, well you guessed it, I successfully unlocked encryption, yippee. So I suppose this is a bug that should be reported, I’m guessing. Hope someone can replicate and confirm issue.
Also how do you add appropriate tags to post when not listed? Hope this is of help.
I tested this with an Icelandic keyboard and can confirm the problem. Digging deeper I found this at GitLab Frequently asked questions. Scroll down to to PASSPHRASE CHARACTER SET . I tested this with Icelandic characters not found on the US/UK keyboards and could not unlock the system after rebooting. Will test this further and enter a bug report. If this by design the users should of course be warned before hand.
Another link from Ubuntu worth reading is Full Disk Encryption for anyone interested in encryption and security.
[quote=“Thorny-Twig, post:1, topic:1172”]
Also how do you add appropriate tags to post when not listed?
[/quote] Not sure what you are referring to “appropriate tags”?
After further investigation - this bug has already been reported.
Keyboard layout encrypting at installation bug 1827501. I understand that a request has been made to have the installer provide a clear message/warning to inform the user.
Yes, this is a known behaviour/issue. I have opened an upstream bug for this some time ago.
To explain it shortly: In contrast to the other flavours, Lubuntu uses the Calamares installer. With Calamares and Full Disk Encryption (FDE), we don’t have an unencrypted /boot partition. The bootloader (GRUB) has to unlock the LUKS container to load the initramfs from /boot.
The only keyboard layout available is the american.
You could (not recommended) use only passphrases, where the keys on your and the american layout, are the same.
The better solution is to add a second passphrase, where the passphrase is typed as if it were typed with the american layout.
Thank you @leok for your swift reply on my installation experience and acknowledging the issue is a bug. My apologies, I didn’t check the https://bugs.launchpad.net website for the same issue. I noticed your recent post indicating the issue is still occurring in Lubuntu 20.04.
Also thank you for the link to the “Full_Disk_Encryption_Howto_2019”, I will have a read of that later. Your link the Gitlab FAQ seems to be looping back to this same post. I take it the link your referenced is this [Frequently Asked Questions Cryptsetup/LUKS](https://gitlab.com/cryptsetup/cryptsetup/-/wikis/FrequentlyAskedQuestions. I read the point about the recommended “use of the 95 printable characters from the first 128 characters of the ASCII table” when setting a passphrase for encrypted partition.
I think the issue which leads to a frustrating install process is that users are just not simply informed at the points of installation that they should enter in a particular passphrase to deal with that startup issue. The other big elephant in the room is the UI/UX experience being quite poor. The overall vagueness at the point where a user has to enter their passphrase, I think personally, needs a serious look. No doubt, a more user-friendly UI/UX window would be of benefit to ease frustrations, also with the option to have more than one attempt at entering the correct passphrase with constructive output informative/error messages.
I wonder should this issue be highlighted in under the release announcement on the current Lubuntu 20.04 download page under heading “Known Bugs”. Sorry I can add appropriate links, I’m limited to adding URL links as it’s my first time in this forum.
