Re: Root Password No Longer Works in KDE

[Jeff Elkins <jeffelkins@earthlink.net>]

On Sunday 11 April 2004 09:18 pm, Scarletdown wrote:
>Earlier today, I had a complete system freezeup for some reason.  All I
>could do to recover was power down and boot back up.  However, when kdm
>tried to run, I was dropped to a text login prompt.
>
>I went ahead and logged in as root and did an apt-get --reinstall
>install kdm; then i ran kdm and was able to get to the graphical login
>screen.  When I logged into the KDE desktop, I discovered that I was
>unable to do anything that required the root password (su, kpackage,
>etc).  I keep getting "Authentication failure".
>
>I know the password is good, because I am able to login as root from a
>text-prompt, and can also SSH in as root from another system; so I am
>suspecting a problem with KDE itself.  As another test, I tried logging
>in to KDE as root from kdm, and that fails as well.
>
>And even more odd is, everytime I reboot, kdm fails and drops me to a
>text-based login, and I have to once again do an apt-get --reinstall
>install kdm.
>
>I have tried everything I could think of at the moment, short of doing
>the dreaded OS reinstall (apt-get --reinstall install x-window-system
>kde and apt-get --reinstall install kde did not fix it either.)  I would
>really prefer to not have to reinstall, since it took me forever the
>first time around to get the nVidia video drivers configured right, and
>I can't remember whether or not I took down notes on how I did it.
>
>So, if anyone here can make sense of my rather rambling description of
>this root password problem, please give some advice on how to get things
>back to normal.  Thanks.

This is a long shot.  Try this file in your /etc/pam.d directory.

Jeff

#
# /etc/pam.d/kdm - specify the PAM behaviour of kdm
#

# The standard Unix authentication modules, used with
# NIS (man nsswitch) as well as normal /etc/passwd and
# /etc/shadow entries.
#@include common-auth
@include common-account
# Remove include common-password line for no password logins
#@include common-password
@include common-session

auth       required     pam_nologin.so
auth       required     pam_env.so
auth       required     pam_permit.so
session    required     pam_limits.so