password to wake up!

Forum: DSL Ideas and Suggestions
Topic: password to wake up!
started by: bokaroseani

Posted by bokaroseani on Feb. 26 2006,02:07

I use a Thinkpad T20 with DSL 2.1b frugal instal. It goes to sleep after inactivity of 10 mins or so. I would like it to ask for a password when it returns from the sleep mode for security reasons. Do other folks have some suggestions of how to deal with it?

My question to the forum is: Is there any way that I can configure DSL so that it asks for a password when it returns from the sleep mode? Do I need to write some kind of code? I am not a programmer; but would appreciate if such a feature is included in future DSL releases. I wonder if that would make it exceed the 50MB limit.

Thank you for any suggestions or comments on this.

Posted by _pathos on Feb. 26 2006,08:29

that password should be set in bios of your laptop. try F2 or delete when you boot it up.

on my Dell L400 I just have a hard drive password so I only need one password which appears when ever I boot up/resume.

the other option is xscreensaver, it is easy to set it up except you have to change /etc/passwd so that you can actually get out of it. To do this use the passwd utility to set the password you want copy it to your home directory and in .bash_profile
add

sudo cp ~/passwd /etc/passwd

this will update /etc/passwd everytime you boot.

I still don't know how to disable Ctrl-Alt-Bksp tho so its not secure if someone knows what they are doing...

Posted by bokaroseani on Feb. 26 2006,18:45

Oh...it was that simple. It never occured to me that setting up the BIOS password would solve my problem. Thanks _pathos.

I havent tried the second method yet. But if its not secure, I wont bother trying it. However it is good to know that there is this option to use the screensaver password. When I use DSL on my office computer, it never goes to sleep. In that case I have no other option but to try your second method.