John M. Harris Jr wrote:
however with Plasma, my desktop environment doesn't have to be
loaded at
all in order for me to ssh in.
This depends (even in the absence of disk encryption) on where you have told
plasma-nm to store your WPA (or 802.11x etc.) credentials (unless you are
using an entirely open network). (The credential storage strategy is
configurable in plasma-nm.)
If the credentials are stored in system-wide unencrypted storage, you can
SSH in immediately. If they are stored in your KWallet, you have to log in
first so that plasma-nm knows what wallet to unlock, and if you use the
default setup, so that the KWallet PAM module can use your login password to
unlock your wallet. (You can also have an entirely passwordless KWallet, but
even that would not help you in this case because NM would still not know
where to look for your credentials. You need to have plasma-nm running, and
as the correct user, to get working KWallet NM integration.) And if you use
a non-empty KWallet password that is not your login password, you also have
to enter that, of course.
Kevin Kofler