Gdm does not allow user to enter user/pass

[Kevin Oberle]

Binary package hint: gdm

Just upgraded from 8.10 to 9.04 Alpha 6.

At the Gdm login I am given no opportunity to enter my username and password. Instead it says "Authentication Failed" and appears to freeze (keyboard/mouse have no effect). I can't even click the system link on the bottom left.

Possibly relevant: I had automatic login enabled in 8.10.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

Thank you for your bug report, can you switch to a vt using ctrl-alt-fn and log there?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

Thanks for your quick reply. Ctrl-alt-fn has no effect. Also for clarification: the mouse does move and the ok button does react to it by turning the orange colour when clicked but it has no other effect.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

can you try to edit the boot line in grub and add the "text" option so gdm doesn't start and see if you can log in on the command line or not?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

Sebastien, I was able to successfully boot and login to the command line with the text option.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

does starting gdm manually then works? if not what happens exactly? is there anything revelant in the logs about the issue?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

Sebastien, After manually starting gdm using 'sudo gdm' I get the same issue. Gdm starts, i see the new gdm login theme load up with the box asking for my username, the username box then quickly disappears and I get the message "Authentication Failed". After that no keyboard or mouse buttons have any effect. All I can do from that point is push the power button to trigger a reboot. I'm not really sure which logs i should be checking or where to find them. I did check /var/gdm/0.log but i don't think there is anything relevant in there. I'll attach it anyway.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

does startx start a working session? can you copy your gdm.conf and gdm.conf-custom to the bug?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

Startx does start a working session.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you see anything in the system logs when getting the issue?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

All these Pam entries at 19:27 show up in /var/log/auth.log. Any other logs i should be checking?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

And from syslog there is this entry:

Mar 19 19:27:19 kevin-laptop gdm[3559]: WARNING: Unable to establish service gdm: Critical error - immediate abort

[Jack Wasey (jackwasey)]

same issue for me: automatic login works, but ctrl-alt-backspace restarts X to an "authentication failure" error on the gdm login screen preventing progress. The system boots into the desktop fine.

Same critical error in syslog.

I had added:

@include common-pamkeyring

to /etc/pam.d/gdm

about to try with this commented out.

[Julio A. Cervantes (julio)]

I did also, like Jack Wasey, added « @include common-pamkeyring » to my /etc/pam.d/gdm

I commented it out and now I no longer get this error/bug. I added that line to deal with an error with the KeyRing manager thing.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

do you still get the issue?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

I was unable to resolve this so I did a clean install. However I didn't try Noche's solution.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

does it work on your new install?

[Kevin Oberle (kevin.oberle)]

Yes everything works as expected in the new install.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

closing the bug now then since that works and the bug lacks detail to figure what was wrong