Cannot enter password at gdm login screen in a 10.04 vmware virtual machine

[Hal Perkins]

I had an up-to-date version of Ubuntu 9.10 running in a vmware fusion virtual machine (OS X 10.6.3, fusion v 3.0.2) and upgraded it to 10.04 beta 2 by running update-manager -d in a terminal window to launch the update. Things seemed to go well enough, with a few warning messages here and there (sorry, forgot to write all of them down). After rebooting the login screen appeared and I was able to click on it to get the password text box. The trouble is that nothing I typed seemed to go into the text box even though the cursor was blinking there, so I wasn't able to enter a password and log in.

This is reproducible - I created a new 9.10 virtual machine from the install cd, reran the update to 10.04, and wound up in the same situation.

[Hal Perkins (hal-oz)]

Followup: I tried installing 10.04beta2 in a new VM directly from the x86 desktop install CD and got the same behavior - can't enter a password in the login dialog.

One thing I forgot to mention is that all of these virtual machines were originally created using VMWare's easy install option. It recognized ubuntu, asks for a username and password, and ran the entire setup unattended. It also installed VMWare Tools in the VM after the first reboot following the installation. I haven't tried a manual install to see if any of that is the problem.

[socceroos (skduff)]

I'm having the same problem with Ubuntu 10.04 beta 2 with all updates as of today (April 12th). The system boots fine, it loads GDM, I can click on my username, but the second the password entry box is displayed X locks up and restarts. I can log in from the command line fine.

Card is an Nvidia GeForce4 MX 4000.

Attachment has excerpts from Xorg.0.log, auth.log, messages and syslog.

[hof1063 (hof1063)]

I was having the same problem but was able to make it go away if I chose the "Enhance contrast in colors" option in the Universal Access Preference screen. The screen can be accessed from the logon screen. It is the icon to the left of the date.

[socceroos (skduff)]

hof1063's method worked for me. After enabling the "Enhance contrast in colors" option in the Universal Access Preference screen I was able to log in.

That is really odd. Also worth noting is that from the log in screen, if you click 'other' as the user, you can type in your username - but still the password box locks up (this is without enabling the "Enhance contrast in colors" option).

[Kevin Sonney (kevin-sonney)]

I'm seeing this issue, however the "Enhance contrast" option did NOT fix this.

17" Mac Book Pro Unibody
2.66 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Mac OS X 10.6.3
VMWare Fusion 3.0.2 (232708)
Fast Install Option
1 CPU Allocated
764 Meg Allocated

Attempted with Internal MBP keyboard, USB PC Keyboard, and VNC Connection to the VM

[Ameet Paranjape (ameetp)]

I could *not* reproduce this error using 'update-manager -d' to upgrade from 9.10 to Lucid beta 2 . My system specs are:

15" MacBook Pro Unibody
2.53 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo
Mac OS X 10.6.3
VMWare Fusion 3.0.2 (232708)

[Hal Perkins (hal-oz)]

Interesting. Since it does sound like it might have something to do with the graphics hardware of all things, maybe the exact machine matters. I had the original problem on an early 2008 macbook pro (last model before the unibody machines came out). I haven't tried the "enhanced contrast" fix yet to see if it fixes the problem on that machine.

[Hal Perkins (hal-oz)]

For what it's worth, the "enhance contrast in colors" option doesn't bypass the problem on my machine.

[Mitch Towner (kermiac)]

I'm seeing something similar when installing 10.04 in a VM using vmware workstation on a HP HDX9200. I can not enter the password at the gdm login screen.
To work-around this issue I used the on-screen keyboard to enter the login password. After logging in the keyboard functions as expected.

[Mitch Towner (kermiac)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. This particular bug has already been reported and is a duplicate of bug 548891, so it is being marked as such. Any further discussion regarding the bug should occur in the other report. Please continue to report any other bugs you may find.

As noted in bug 548891, the workaround is to reset your keyboard model by running "sudo dpkg-reconfigure console-setup" (without the quotes) on your affected Lucid virtual machines.