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Gnome screensaver remains blank not allowing to unlock

Sun, 2009.02.08 - 20:45 — müzso
For the last couple of weeks I had an issue with Gnome Screensaver: it locked my screen and despite me moving the mouse or pressing any keys, the unlock dialog would not appear and the screen stayed blank (since I had the "Blank screen" selected in preferences). On every action (keypress or move of the mouse) the cursor appeared briefly, but only for the split of a second.

A few messages in /var/log/auth.log revealed the problem:
Feb  8 02:05:37 server22 gnome-screensaver-dialog: PAM _pam_load_conf_file: unable to open /etc/pam.d/common-auth
Feb  8 02:05:37 server22 gnome-screensaver-dialog: PAM error loading (null)
Feb  8 02:05:37 server22 gnome-screensaver-dialog: PAM _pam_init_handlers: error reading /etc/pam.d/gnome-screensaver
Feb  8 02:05:37 server22 gnome-screensaver-dialog: PAM _pam_init_handlers: [Critical error - immediate abort]
Feb  8 02:05:37 server22 gnome-screensaver-dialog: PAM error reading PAM configuration file
Feb  8 02:05:37 server22 gnome-screensaver-dialog: PAM pam_start: failed to initialize handlers

Gnome Screensaver is using the usual method for user authentication, namely PAM. The problem was that the various common-* files in the /etc/pam.d directory were only readable by root. I'm not sure how this happened since I used only auth-client-config to change the PAM config. Anyway ... giving world-readable rights (chmod a+r /etc/pam.d/*) on the various PAM config files solved the problem.

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Wed, 2010.06.16 - 08:28 — Bunio_FH (not verified)

Thnx =)

got exactly the same one today, ty