I cannot insert the non-US keyboard character required for my decryption passphrase! Help!

Hardware Librem 5
1

I have changed the decryption passphrase using the procedure indicated in the Quick Start Guide v 1.3.4 (“Change your Drive Passphrase”).

My new passphrase uses a non-standard character for US_qwerty keyboard, coming from the “Switzerland (French)” keyboard.

Very unpleasant surprise: it seems there is no option to change the keyboard when I’m asked “Enter disk decryption passphrase”. I have tried to plug an external keyboard, to no effect…

I am completely stuck at the start because I cannot insert the special character (in this case: “à”) in the decryption passphrase.

Please help! What should I do?

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You have two options:

  1. Use Jumpdrive to mount the Librem 5 as a USB mass storage device on an external computer, then use GNOME Disks or similar to manually change the LUKS encryption key to a compatible password.
  2. Reflash the Librem 5.
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If this is about a laptop or desktop computer, then you could boot from a USB stick, like a Debian installer, or some “live install” image (Debian -- Live install images) or similar, that will let you set the keyboard layout you need and then unlock the disk from there, and change the passphrase. If it’s about a L5, you could use Jumpdrive as FranklyFlawless is saying.

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Many thanks for the clear answer.

If I understand correctly, I should install Jumpdrive on a separate UBS key and connect it to L5. Correct? How does it work exactly?

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No. Jumpdrive works rather differently from this.

The basic outline would be:

  • Using a desktop/laptop that runs Linux and which has suitably recent software versions
  • Download the Jumpdrive software to that desktop/laptop
  • Put your phone in Serial Download mode, connecting your phone via USB to the desktop/laptop
  • run the script on your desktop/laptop that will load Jumpdrive via USB from the desktop/laptop to the phone

The phone will boot and is now running Jumpdrive. That will cause the phone to expose its one or two disks as USB mass storage device class devices.

If you have not done this before then it can be confusing. So it is better to ask too many questions rather than too few.

From there you can use the normal tools on the desktop/laptop to fix the LUKS passphrase. (Presumably for example you have no problem to enter accented characters on the desktop/laptop.)

As an aside, for the benefit of other readers, the man page specifically says about LUKS … don’t do what you have done.

It is therefore highly recommended to select passphrase characters only from 7-bit ASCII

(my emphasis)

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