Strange grub behaviour - Trisquel 7
Grub has started asking for a username and password before it will boot other OS's in its menu. After some mooching about I found a reference in the grub.cfg file that seemed to refer to a name and password which subsequently turned out to be the ones I wanted.
Is this a new feature or a bug I should report?
I hope it will not be Trisquel 7's default: it is annoying and does not bring any real additional security (except in very specific environments such as kiosks) as GRUB's developers write in https://www.gnu.org/software/grub/manual/grub.html#Security :
By default, the boot loader interface is accessible to anyone with physical access to the console: anyone can select and edit any menu entry, and anyone can get direct access to a GRUB shell prompt. For most systems, this is reasonable since anyone with direct physical access has a variety of other ways to gain full access, and requiring authentication at the boot loader level would only serve to make it difficult to recover broken systems.
However, in some environments, such as kiosks, it may be appropriate to lock down the boot loader to require authentication before performing certain operations.
Here is everything you want to know about GRUB passwords: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2/Passwords
We have unnecessary complexity under the hood and a massively dumbed down UI. GNU/Linux is being destroyed, before our eyes, by idiots.
Hello,
So I'm running the latest image of Trisquel 7 amd64 on my Acer notebook and I've installed Trisquel alongside Windows and Debian.
After a completely fresh install of all these operating systems grub (Trisquel's Grub) has been installed by default requesting a username and password to boot Debian and Windows. All my username and password attempts have failed and just brought me back to the grub splash screen. I can only select Trisquel without being prompted by the username and password request.
My question is, what is the default username and password and why have this set by default in the first place?
I checked out the links above but I'm still lost as to how to get around this.
Any solution would be much appreciated!
Thanks,
Steve
Howdy!
At least on tris 6 you can find the credentials for your install at /etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD
Probably removing those will remove the question.
Hope you can soon get rid of the non-free stuff.
Hi lembas,
Thanks so much for the quick reply! I hope to be able to purge my computer of non-free stuff soon too. Most of my computer is free at least due to Debian being free by default.
So I followed the path to 01_PASSWORD and I'm wondering, how do you open this file to edit it. I can't seem to find an application to open it. Have I to tweak it via the terminal? If so, how would one go about that?
Thanks in advance!
Steve
Hi again lembas,
I figured it out and I managed to remove the username and password request from grub.
I opened a terminal and entered the following command to see the username and password credentials:
sudo cat /etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD
Then I entered the following command to edit the 01_PASSWORD file.
gksu gedit /etc/grub.d/01_PASSWORD
In order to stop grub from requesting a username and password I commented out all the lines or you can delete the lines. Then save and type:
sudo update-grub2
Hope this helps other people.
Steve
Thank you Steve. I did the same and got rid of passwords.
I installed LILO.
I love LILO, it's so simple and easy to understand.
I upgraded from 6 to 7 thinking everything would be hunky dory. I am having this problem and can't even get to a terminal to update this. Would you suggest using something like rescatux to edit the grub 2 file?
Rescatux nailed the problem. 7 is now booting just fine.