Hello, all. I'm new to LQ, but I've been doing Linux for years.

I just upgraded to Fedora 15 from 13, and I was quite impressed that the auto upgrade process went smoothly. Unfortunately, I'm now having authentication issues.

One of them is, I can't log in as root any more from the console (Gnome GUI). When I try, it tells me "Authentication failed." Fortunately, I can log in remotely as root.

Does anybody know why it fails on the console?

Thanks,
Chris

'tailf /var/log/secure' ?

I thought it was several versions back that root login on the GUI was disabled by default.
Its possible that you amended it in F13, but of course F15 would have reset that.
Its generally regarded as a bad idea to allow root to login through the GUI or remotely.
You should be able to login as root at the console in single user mode, I think.
For the GUI or remotely you should login as yourself, then 'su - ' up to root.
I was also under the impression that upgrading in-place for Fedora was not recommended, but that may have changed.

Thank you both for your quick replies.

Yes, I agree that one should not normally log in to the console as root, but I was trying to fix something else that required me to not be logged in as a user. I wanted to have access to the GUI system tools as root so that I could delete/add my user.

I had also looked in /var/log/secure, but it wasn't very useful:

Jun 29 17:55:56 Chris01 runuser: pam_unix(runuser:session): session opened for user root by (uid=0)
Jun 29 17:55:56 Chris01 runuser: pam_unix(runuser:session): session closed for user root

I have a feeling that Chris is right that someone in their infinite wisdom decided to disable root access from the console. :-) I personally don't want to be restricted in that manner. I rarely log in via the console, and when I do, it's for a good reason. I define a desktop that clearly reminds me that I'm logged in as root so I don't do something stupid by mistake.

Do you know how to enable root access on the console?

Thanks again.
Chris

fedora changed A LOT of things from 14 to 15
MORE things from 13 to 15

i am surprised that a upgrade even worked .

a full clean new install of 15 might work better

also see the release notes
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/...tes/index.html
and " Changes in Fedora for System Administrators"
http://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/..._SysAdmin.html