Force password prompt to work in terminal instead of GUI
I am not sure what’s causing this, but it’s mildly frustrating.
I’m sshing into my machine (Ubuntu 21.10) and invoking a tilix session to my client machine. I trying to run an app (from within tilix remotely), I need to run which should prompt for a password. The machine is running a GUI (kded5), but that shouldn’t matter. I’m ssh’ed into the machine. This app prompts for password in the GUI instead of in the terminal.
I’ve tried unsetting DISPLAY. I’ve tried setting SSH_ASKPASS_REQUIRE=never (used them separately and together). I’ve tried various other things but to no avail. Since I’m using kded5, the system alternatives is set to /usr/bin/kshaskpass. I haven’t tried setting it to something else:
at 14:25:06 ❯ update-alternatives --display ssh-askpass
ssh-askpass - auto mode
link best version is /usr/bin/ksshaskpass
link currently points to /usr/bin/ksshaskpass
link ssh-askpass is /usr/bin/ssh-askpass
slave ssh-askpass.1.gz is /usr/share/man/man1/ssh-askpass.1.gz
/usr/bin/ksshaskpass - priority 35
slave ssh-askpass.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/ksshaskpass.1.gz
/usr/lib/ssh/x11-ssh-askpass - priority 10
slave ssh-askpass.1.gz: /usr/share/man/man1/x11-ssh-askpass.1x.gz
To be clear, what I want is simple…
if I’m the terminal to the machine, use the terminal to prompt for passwords. If I’m in the GUI, use the GUI or at least point me in the direction on how to temporarily use terminal prompting if so desired.
TIA!
Well it’s not perfect, but I had to settle for the hints here…
The problem was mainly stemming from my signing code to github, which when I attempted to commit code, a dialog box was being created in my GUI, but I couldn’t or wasn’t seeing that from my Xserver. It was popping it up off-screen. So I needed to force console password entry. I finally found this hinting that gpg-agent was the culprit for asking for the password. So, I tweaked my $HOME/.gnupg/gpg-agent.conf, which I had to create as it did not exist, yet. In the link, the option is there to use pinentry-curses, which I already have installed. Finally, issuing the command gpg-connect-agent reloadagent /bye and re-committing my code confirmed my issue was fixed. I hope this helps someone else. It’s not perfect, but it gets me what I was desiring.