Fedora Core 6, plain installation. Nuthin Fancy

No matter how I add new users (either through GUI or useradd), I get an Authentication Failed. I can only log in as root. ALL user accounts fail.

It is weird weird weird. I've done tests with upper/lower case, test accounts, long passwords, short ones, numbers, letters... Nada

I'm HOSED

Look at /etc/passwd for the users that you added.

Try to su to those users as root in a terminal.

If that works (I expect it will), try logging in as those users.

And be very careful about spelling, capitalization, etc. (of course)

If necessary, you can use the passwd command as root to set the password of any user (if that's the problem).

Thanks for the response.

I did most of those tasks already. All the users are there in etc/passwd.

The data is displayed properly in the GUI user admin tool also.

Sometimes, when I enter the username in Gnome login screen, it waits a second, then I get the password screen, enter the password and it waits for a minute like its authenticating, but then I get back to the username screen

at the bottom of the screen is says to make sure that the case is correct

Other times, I enter exactly the same username/password and I get an immediate BIG red "Authentication Failed" window.

Totally inconsistent. I cannot for the life of me figure this one out.

I finally thought I had a totally stable install of this thing

I have no idea what to do next. I can usually get through these things easily, but this one has me totally stumped.

Try to su to those users as root in a terminal.

I did a fresh install of FC6 and copied the /etc/passwd entries from my FC5 system. I got the authentication failure problem. Then I used the GUI to remove the users, and add them back in. the problem went away.

Thanks again for hanging in the thread with me. I tried that, and still got bounced.

I decided to to a clean reinstall, cuz I wasn't that far in yet.

This time things worked ok, except Gnome wouldn't start, even on runlevel 5. Seemed to clear itself up though (I think its the first boot job that gets things confused)