gdm login screen says "Something went wrong please try again" three times and sends me back to the login screen when I'm not typing anything
Affects | Status | Importance | Assigned to | Milestone | |
---|---|---|---|---|---|
gdm3 (Ubuntu) |
Incomplete
|
Undecided
|
Unassigned |
Bug Description
After today's update to all of the current Hirsute packages, I can't login in. When I click on my username on the gdm3 login screen, it immediately displays with shaking the error "Sorry, that didn't work. Please try again." It does this three times, and then sends me back to the main login screen. It does this EVEN THOUGH I'M NOT TYPING ANYTHING. Please see the attached video.
I tried downgrading a bunch of packages but wasn't able to find a downgrade that made the problem go away.
ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 21.04
Package: gdm3 3.38.1-2ubuntu1.1
ProcVersionSign
Uname: Linux 5.10.0-14-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.11-0ubuntu59
Architecture: amd64
CasperMD5CheckR
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Sat Feb 27 16:20:47 2021
InstallationDate: Installed on 2019-08-16 (561 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 19.04 "Disco Dingo" - Release amd64 (20190416)
SourcePackage: gdm3
UpgradeStatus: Upgraded to hirsute on 2021-02-20 (6 days ago)
I figured out the problem. When I upgraded packages today, it uninstalled fprintd-clients but did not install libpam-fprintd. /etc/pam. d/gdm-fingerpri nt says that gdm is supposed to open pam_fprintd.so, but it couldn't because it wasn't available any longer.
I have no understanding of the intricacies of all the package dependencies that caused this broken situation to be allowed to occur. I will, however, mention that previous to today's package upgrade, I had open-fprintd installed, _not_ fprintd, because the fprintd that ships with Ubuntu is incompatible with my fingerprint reader (Lenovo Thinkpad X1 Carbon 6th gen). I don't know whether this is relevant to the problem that occurred here.
To fix this, I had to uninstall open-fprintd (which means I can no longer use my fingerprint reader) and install libpam-fprintd, which pulled in the fprintd package along with it even though that's useless to me since that fprintd doesn't work with my reader.
I am now unable to use open-fprintd because it conflicts with the fprintd package but I can't uninstall fprintd because that will cause libpam-fprintd to be uninstalled as well. But I'm going to open a separate ticket about that, since that's a different issue from the fact that today's upgrade made my system unusable as described above.