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elementary / greeter

Login and Lock Screen greeter for elementary OS and Pantheon, using LightDM
GNU General Public License v3.0
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Open terminal from login screen #497

Closed etkaar closed 3 years ago

etkaar commented 3 years ago

See also Q&A #496.

Problem

There are cases where you would need a terminal before logged in. Usually you would open a fullscreen TTY using Ctrl+Alt+F1-F6; however, this is not as simple as it sounds, because unfortunately in many cases this will not work due to driver problems (it will end in a simple blackscreen). There may be ways to fix that by editing or updating grub, but I personally had no chance. In that case, you need to do a more or less complex and time intense rescue to fix the problem behind.

If there is anything wrong with the login/lock screen, e.g. due to an accidentially removal of required packages, you will end up locked out of the entire system:

locked-out

The possibility to initiate a terminal from the login/lock screen would solve this and would make eOS more robust.

Proposal

Icon and/or shortcut to open a terminal from the login/lock screen.

cassidyjames commented 3 years ago

This seems like trying to fix a problem with a potentially bigger problem, and an invitation to way too much trouble. For extreme recovery needs (like a non-launching session), there is already recovery mode when booting and the TTY. If those don't work for some specific reason, then those should be fixed, but I don't think the solution is to add a Terminal here. Especially since the greeter is a privileged user.