better change password tool wanted

Patrick · May 15, 2020, 2:55pm

https://www.whonix.org/wiki/Post_Install_Advice#Change_Passwords comment was posted:

i cant type anything after i type “passwd”

A good example of what kinds of things users are struggling with.

My answer:

Password is not shown on the screen when you type it. You have to type blindly. No asterisk sign (*) will be shown either. Just type. It will work.

We will document this.

Added.

Is there any GUI tool in XFCE (or otherwise installable) for this purpose?

Is there any alternative to the CLI passwd tool? Can passwd be made to show asterisk sign ( * )?

HulaHoop · May 6, 2019, 4:27am

sudo apt install gnome-system-tools

Appears under the whisker menu as “users and groups”

Comandline called with “users-admin”

https://www.ibm.com/developerworks/community/blogs/58e72888-6340-46ac-b488-d31aa4058e9c/entry/linux_command_line_user_management_tools228?lang=en

Patrick · May 6, 2019, 8:59am

sudo apt install gnome-system-tools --no-install-recommends
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree       
Reading state information... Done
The following additional packages will be installed:
  liboobs-1-5 system-tools-backends
Suggested packages:
  ntp
The following NEW packages will be installed:
  gnome-system-tools liboobs-1-5 system-tools-backends
0 upgraded, 3 newly installed, 0 to remove and 57 not upgraded.
Need to get 4,401 kB of archives.
After this operation, 10.4 MB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue? [Y/n]

Looks ok.

Not the greatest tool but easier than passwd. If there are no better suggestions this can be added for installation by default in Whonix 15.

madaidan · May 6, 2019, 4:03pm

You could use a simple bash script like

read -r -p "What user's password do you want to change? " user 
read -r -p "What is the new password? " password 
echo "${user}:${password}" | chpasswd

onion_knight · May 7, 2019, 9:58am

Not seeing keyboard output when running passwd is a standard and expected behavior on all GNU/Linux systems I know of. This is just how it works. I think even first-time users can accept that. I don’t think Whonix needs an additional package to deal with this non-problem.

madaidan:

You could use a simple bash script like

read -r -p "What user's password do you want to change? " user 
read -r -p "What is the new password? " password 
echo "${user}:${password}" | chpasswd

That’s a nice workaround! Would you know how to replace the cleartext output with **** instead?

Patrick · May 7, 2019, 10:12am

I was contemplating adding it to existing package https://github.com/Whonix/usability-misc.

That’s a question which prevented me from implementing this already. Found a solution https://askubuntu.com/a/299469/389275

Patrick · May 7, 2019, 11:43am

Please review:

madaidan · May 7, 2019, 6:43pm

It looks great!