Logon not working

Ask Fedora
1

Occassionally logon from screen lock does not work. I can type my password but nothing happens on Enter or clicking the arrow button. What does work is clicking on Switch user and logon.

Is this a known anomaly? Is there something I can do to repair it?

2

I have 3 systems running F43 or F44-prelease and haven’t seen this. When reporting issues it is helpful if you can provide enough detail to allow others with similar hardware to reproduce the issue. Generally you want to ensure that Fedora and vendor firmware are fully updated to avoid long exchanges trying to match versions remotely and to avoid wasting time on issues that have been fixed.

You may find useful details in the journal.

3

I saw this once this week (relative to many unlocks, so it seems to be a low-probability event).

I didn’t try “Switch User”, but for me sleeping and rewaking fixed it.

I’ll keep an eye and look more closely at the logs if it happens again.

4

I have also experienced this issue a few times. Rebooting the system worked for me. If it happens again I’ll remember to save the logs :slight_smile:

5

I have — sometimes — three screens hooked up to my laptop. The logon screen appears on all three of them but only one shows accepting keystrokes. It could be that this is/was the problem. I type, nothing happens on two of three screens.

6

The journal saves past events, so you may already have relevant details.

7

Possibly related:

The person who has proposed a fix says:

I’ve identified two flaws that cause this.

  1. The plasma-desktop QML triggers startAuthenticating() on every onUiVisibleChanged, including the transition to invisible. In my reproduction, this causes a rapid reattempt, which is then handled incorrectly. The graceLockTimer makes it impossible to trigger this with normal password submissions. This is good UX, but makes it hard to reproduce the bug.
  2. The rapid reattempt is not handled correctly. The recently introduced return in PamWorker::authenticate() causes the flow to terminate without emitting any signal. PamAuthenticators has already transitioned to the Authenticating state, and only returns to Idle when it receives a failed() or succeeded() signal. Since neither is emitted, the state is permanently stuck at Authenticating, causing startAuthenticating() to silently reject all subsequent attempts.

I have reproduced this with a single monitor. A multi-monitor setup could trigger the same issue, because onExited also sets uiVisible = false, triggering startAuthenticating() via onUiVisibleChanged.

Note the bold part about multi-monitor setups like mine and @theking2 's.