Having big problems with my KDE screensaver. I'm using Slackware 10.1
and ever since I installed the latest patch packages, whenever I enter
my password in the password protected screen saver, it fails. I've
check my password in other terminal windows and it still works. Has
anyone else dealt with this? Is there a fix?

Tony Fleming

Tony <mtony75@gmail.com> wrote:
> Having big problems with my KDE screensaver. I'm using Slackware 10.1
> and ever since I installed the latest patch packages, whenever I enter
> my password in the password protected screen saver, it fails. I've
> check my password in other terminal windows and it still works. Has
> anyone else dealt with this? Is there a fix?
>
> Tony Fleming
>

Did you update KDE? Where did you get the packages from? The updated
KDE packages may require PAM interaction to unlock its
screensaver. Dunno why someone would build this into Slack packages
(Slack doesn't use PAM) but I've been bitten by it before. I build my
own, now, just to get around that.

Look in /var/log/messages immediately after a password fail and see
who is erroring out.

--------------------------------------------
John Bleichert - syborg@earthlink.net
Have you been eaten by a grue lately?

John Bleichert wrote:
> Tony <mtony75@gmail.com> wrote:
> > Having big problems with my KDE screensaver. I'm using Slackware 10.1
> > and ever since I installed the latest patch packages, whenever I enter
> > my password in the password protected screen saver, it fails. I've
> > check my password in other terminal windows and it still works. Has
> > anyone else dealt with this? Is there a fix?
> >
> > Tony Fleming
> >
>
> Did you update KDE? Where did you get the packages from? The updated
> KDE packages may require PAM interaction to unlock its
> screensaver. Dunno why someone would build this into Slack packages
> (Slack doesn't use PAM) but I've been bitten by it before. I build my
> own, now, just to get around that.
>
> Look in /var/log/messages immediately after a password fail and see
> who is erroring out.
>
> --------------------------------------------
> John Bleichert - syborg@earthlink.net
> Have you been eaten by a grue lately?

Got the updates from a Slackware mirror site. This is the messages I
get in /var/adm/messages after the failed attempt

Aug 29 11:08:15 SOMESERVER kcheckpass[3631]: Authentication failure for
SOMEUSER(invoked by uid 1000)

uid 1000 is my UID.

Tony Fleming

Tony wrote:

> Having big problems with my KDE screensaver. I'm using Slackware 10.1
> and ever since I installed the latest patch packages, whenever I enter
> my password in the password protected screen saver, it fails. I've
> check my password in other terminal windows and it still works. Has
> anyone else dealt with this? Is there a fix?
>
> Tony Fleming

I have seen this sort of thing a lot with KDE, with many distributions. I no
longer rely on its screen blanker, opting for letting xscreensaver do it
instead. Here's how to use xscreensaver under KDE:

http://www.jwz.org/xscreensaver/man1.html#10

Tony <mtony75@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> John Bleichert wrote:
>> Tony <mtony75@gmail.com> wrote:
>> > Having big problems with my KDE screensaver. I'm using Slackware 10.1
>> > and ever since I installed the latest patch packages, whenever I enter
>> > my password in the password protected screen saver, it fails. I've
>> > check my password in other terminal windows and it still works. Has
>> > anyone else dealt with this? Is there a fix?
>> >
>> > Tony Fleming
>> >
>>
>> Did you update KDE? Where did you get the packages from? The updated
>> KDE packages may require PAM interaction to unlock its
>> screensaver. Dunno why someone would build this into Slack packages
>> (Slack doesn't use PAM) but I've been bitten by it before. I build my
>> own, now, just to get around that.
>>
>> Look in /var/log/messages immediately after a password fail and see
>> who is erroring out.
>>
>
> Got the updates from a Slackware mirror site. This is the messages I
> get in /var/adm/messages after the failed attempt
>
> Aug 29 11:08:15 SOMESERVER kcheckpass[3631]: Authentication failure for
> SOMEUSER(invoked by uid 1000)
>
> uid 1000 is my UID.
>
> Tony Fleming
>

I would bet this is the standard issue Slack/KDE PAM failure. If you
know enough about PAM you can fix this by creating an appropriate file
in /etc/pam.d - I know squat about pam and don't care to learn about
it, so I built the kdebas package myself with the correct switches
(re: PAM and shadow) and it works fine. On a quick box with a lot of
RAM it's no big deal. On a lower-wattage box it can take a while.

As someone else suggested, using xlock or xscreensaver is fine, but if
you like the KDE screenlocker, you may have to build it yourself, or
look for a KDE update directly from Mr. V.

It took me a while to figure out how to build all of KDE from source,
but once you get the hang of it, it *does* provide you with a great
KDE install.

Just my 0.02 USD.

--------------------------------------------
John Bleichert - syborg@earthlink.net
Have you been eaten by a grue lately?

Did you get the source from the source packages or directly from the
slack source packages or did you do it from the KDE source?