6

I'm running the latest version of LUbuntu (just downloaded and install this week). This morning when my computer woke up the xscreensaver dialog popped up saying "Authentication failed". However, it never gave me a chance to enter my password.

xscreensaver dialog box

The resolution was that I had to hard power down my machine and reboot, but I would like to know why this occurred and how to prevent it in the future.

Dave
  • 25,513
Michael
  • 2,824

2 Answers2

3

I had the same behaviour in xubuntu 12.04.2. Then i looked into the contents of /var/log/auth.log and found this:

xscreensaver[22729]: PAM _pam_load_conf_file: unable to open /etc/pam.d/common-session

So i listed the directory and found that the file /etc/pam.d/common-session is not world-readable, like all other files in the directory. A

sudo chmod o+r /etc/pam.d/common-session

solved my problem. No idea where the wrong mode came from.

pixelbrei
  • 146
2

I just got this. Rather than reboot, I:

  • switched to another tty
  • logged in as root
  • ran killall xscreensaver
  • logged out of the tty
  • switched back to the graphical terminal

and the broken xscreensaver was gone :)

I suppose I could have used lynx to google for a solution while in the terminal.

@pixelbrei's solution won't work for me as I'm on systemd, but a reboot will hopefully fix things (I ran a full system upgrade pacman -Syu prior to the problem occuring).

Mark K Cowan
  • 717