Yes! you read it right.
It happened with my brother last night, when I was getting him started with the programming and the tech. he was about to begin his journey with. The beginning wasn't actually great. We had a PC at home with 1 GB RAM, and it already lagged pretty good for a 9-yr old PC. I had created a bootable USB* for installing Ubu-14.04* in dual boot with the existing Windows. So I asked him to empty a drive for the same purpose. Now, simply plugging in the usb and rebooting was required. After reboot, I was searching for boot device priority in the BIOS settings so that I could prioritize my USB, but somehow that option wasn't there! Luckily for us, I had previously installed mint via wubi, so I just selected to install mint dual-boot using Ubiquity*.
Things got pretty straight from then on, and after almost half an hour, the installation was complete. However, when we were about to come to the interesting part - excited as we both were - my beloved brother forgot the login credentials - username to be precise. He was sure about the password as it was to be entered twice, but he failed to notice the username. This bit is also surprising, since afaik, linux installers don't autofill the usernames, but as my brother was saying, something surely had happened.
Now, Cinnamon login screens prefer a doubly secure login mechanism - it requires you to enter the username and password correctly in order to login. No such thing as guest login, or new user, or users list is available as is the case with ubuntu login. So, in short, it seemed that we got screwed. We might need - in worst case - to reinstall the mint from some other CD!
Petrified as I was, I asked him to google how to do 'Forgot Password' for linux. Now, after his exams have got over, my brother has been really into his new android phone, carefully and deeply noticing every feature it has to provide. So he was ranting why there wasn't any option of password reset using Gmail account and all! Finally, we stumbled across a blogpost explaining the same.
I was unsure how to react - how will it help me recover my login credentials? I hadn't even used it for once, and heck I just knew one word - my passwd for sure. What did it mean for user security and privacy? I thought Linux was safe and couldn't be trespassed into. I was about to get surprised!
It happened with my brother last night, when I was getting him started with the programming and the tech. he was about to begin his journey with. The beginning wasn't actually great. We had a PC at home with 1 GB RAM, and it already lagged pretty good for a 9-yr old PC. I had created a bootable USB* for installing Ubu-14.04* in dual boot with the existing Windows. So I asked him to empty a drive for the same purpose. Now, simply plugging in the usb and rebooting was required. After reboot, I was searching for boot device priority in the BIOS settings so that I could prioritize my USB, but somehow that option wasn't there! Luckily for us, I had previously installed mint via wubi, so I just selected to install mint dual-boot using Ubiquity*.
Things got pretty straight from then on, and after almost half an hour, the installation was complete. However, when we were about to come to the interesting part - excited as we both were - my beloved brother forgot the login credentials - username to be precise. He was sure about the password as it was to be entered twice, but he failed to notice the username. This bit is also surprising, since afaik, linux installers don't autofill the usernames, but as my brother was saying, something surely had happened.
Now, Cinnamon login screens prefer a doubly secure login mechanism - it requires you to enter the username and password correctly in order to login. No such thing as guest login, or new user, or users list is available as is the case with ubuntu login. So, in short, it seemed that we got screwed. We might need - in worst case - to reinstall the mint from some other CD!
 |
| Image Credits - webupd8.org |
 |
| Image Credits - webupd8.org |
I was unsure how to react - how will it help me recover my login credentials? I hadn't even used it for once, and heck I just knew one word - my passwd for sure. What did it mean for user security and privacy? I thought Linux was safe and couldn't be trespassed into. I was about to get surprised!
No comments:
Post a Comment