grub-installer currently does not support setting a grub password when
grub2 is selected.

grub2 supports now setting a password.
I just documented that in the wiki:
http://grub.enbug.org/Authentication

It's a bit different then grub-legacy's.
/etc/default/grub doestn't have any support for it.
I think the best would be to create a /etc/grub.d/01_password file or
something like that.

tag 477092 + patch
thanks

Here's now a patch which adds support to set a username and password for
GRUB 2
The debconf templates probable need to be changed. I'm not that perfect
in writing them.
And I wasn't sure what to do if people enter a username but no password.
Now I just don't set anything if no password has been given just like
with grub-legacy.

Best behaviour is probably to fail displaying that the password can't
be empty, like it is currently done in user-setup.

Cheers,

(CC'ing dle for templates review)

Quoting Felix Zielcke (fzielcke@z-51.de):

"s/your system/the system"

maybe s/starting up/booting up"

I'm not sure about "To defend against this"

"username" or "user name"?


I'd suggest something else than "you want to use".

Maybe "Please enter the GRUB 2 password."

We need to choose between "GRUB 2" and "GRUB". Probably drop the
"2". After all, this might be used in an hypothetical GRUB3, right? :-)

Another option is somethign similar to the root password prompt:

_Description: GRUB password:
 You need to set a password for GRUB. A malicious or unqualified user
 with GRUB access can have disastrous results, so you should take care
 to choose a GRUB password that is not easy to guess. It should not be
 a word found in dictionaries, or a word that could be easily
 associated with you.

(that will help translators as fuzzy matching will prefill translations)

You may want to use the same wording than the similar template in
user-setup:

_Description: Empty password
 You entered an empty password, which is not allowed.
 Please choose a non-empty password.

Christian Perrier wrote:
[...]

No strong opinion on any of these (even the "you might not be the
owner" quibble is weak here).

One word.  "Christian Perrier" and "Justin B Rye" are user names,
but not their usernames.
[...]

Looks good to me.
and you don't want (to get) authorization, you want there to be
authentication.

This loses the advice on what to do if you're not trying to set up a
password.  On the other hand, how would I apply that advice if I
didn't already know about dpkg-reconfigure?  Is there a "back"
button?

^Did you get our proposal? let me know.
Thanks
Mrs. Agnes Cardella