Fedora 10: unable to authenticate user and reenabling the root login access.
PROBLEM
In Fedora 10, the root login was disabled into the GUI, giving you a unable to authenticate user message. You may have noticed that you got a warning about this in Fedora 9 but it wasn’t yet disabled then. Not so in Fedora 10 so this might be something you would want to do prior to rebooting after upgrading to Fedora 10. I’m not all too surprised this eventually happened. It’s not uncommon to hear of this whereever you happen to ask. So essentially the pot finally boiled over and we have no root login. This effects Gnome, KDE and the whole lot.
Essentially the problem relies in the GDM file.
SOLUTION
Anyway, here is how to enable or reenable it should you run into the same problem.
- At the UI login screen hit CTRL-ALT-F2 to switch to a ready terminal login screen.
- Login as the root user ID.
- cd /etc/pam.d/
- cp -aR gdm gdm.old
- vi /etc/pam.d/gdm
- Comment out the line like this (add item in green):
# auth required pam_succeed_if.so user != root quiet - Type :wq to write the file out and quit.
- Type CTRL-ALT-F7 to return to the login session.
- Try to login as root again.
Of course there could be other issues. Possibly you may need to reset your password and if you are trying to edit the /etc/pam.d/gdm file from within the UI as an unprevilidged user, then you’ll also need to su - or sudo as root. If the above doesn’t work, you’ll need to restart the system and login using the root account in single user mode.
thanx for the support!
but, when i tried it in my newly installed Fedora 10 from live cd, i get the following
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cp -aR gdm gdm.old
cp: cannot create regular file `gdm.old’: Permission denied
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the same happens when i try to edit the file gdm.
is there any other way, i can edit this thing! pls help….
Bah! My bad. You need to login as root through the terminal login screen. (Do that often enough and it gets taken for granted.) Just updated the steps above to reflect this.
Cheers & Good Luck!