Re: SuSE 10.2 and LOADNATIONALKEYB=1

[Peter_22@xxxxxx]

> How is the script going to know what live-CD you are going to boot next,
> and
> what character encoding defaults that live-CD uses?

The idea was rather to check the current character encoding. However this doesn´t solve the problem. Passphrases should be made up of ASCII characters only. UTF8KEYBMODE=1 in initrd.conf does not solve the problem. Again, the use of Live-DVD/CD derives from the need for a maintenance environment to do the root encryption or manually run fsck if needed. For removable media it might be a fine thing to handle encrypted content on different Linux distros.

> µ and ü seemed to have correct encoding in both text console and X
> windows.
> But not all distros use same encoding, Knoppix default: ISO8859-15, SUSE
> default: UTF-8.
Sure, both distros can display non-ASCII characters correctly but a created key might suffer portability.

> You select some keyboard layout file at distro install time.
Yes, and I also configured the kernel to have ISO-8859-15 built in. Later in the boot process something like this happens:
Loading keymap i386/qwertz/de-latin1-nodeadkeys.map.gz done
Loading compose table latin1.add                       done
Seems like dumpkeys lacks this compose table to be included in the default.kmap. I´m uncertain.

> My current understanding is that keyboard mode is always ASCII at kernel
> boot. Distro init scripts then change the default to something else.
Yes I think so. I looked in kernel configuration for character devices and the console. There is no selection for UTF-8 or something else. In this case passphrases with non-ASCII chars are not supported at boot time and should be avoided.

> UTF8KEYBMODE=1 in build-initrd.sh config sets keyboard to UTF-8 mode
> before
> passphrase is asked.
This is what I wanted. I tried with different keys made from the SuSE console. It failed in all my attempts. I feel very discontent with the SuSE 10.2 release. To fix the changes they made lies beyond my skills.
Thanks for your patience and assistance so far.

Best regards,
Peter
-- 
Ist Ihr Browser Vista-kompatibel? Jetzt die neuesten 
Browser-Versionen downloaden: http://www.gmx.net/de/go/browser

-
Linux-crypto:  cryptography in and on the Linux system
Archive:       http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/