I recently bought a thinkpad x60 and wanted to use the pam fingerprint module... so I compiled and installed the latest version of PAM...

This totally screwed my system, the default "make install". First, the lines "@include" in the PAM configuration files in the /etc/pam.d folder do not work. Those lines don't include anything, they're just silently ignored which locked me out of the system right after doing make install.

Went into single user mode, figured out finally that that was the problem, removed those lines and added default ones. Now I can login.

Then I find that it installed this unix_chkpwd program for helping it check shadowed passwords without the setuid bit, so some other things weren't working.

Now "sudo" as well as "sshd" do not work. I have no idea why. I've added files for them in pam.d, I've recompiled and reinstalled both enabled with PAM.

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With sudo, I'm getting "sudo: pam_unix(sudo:auth): authentication failure; logname=peterius uid=0 euid=0 tty=tty2 ruser= rhost= user=peterius"

This is in the auth.log. I tried adding the "debug" and "audit" after "pam_unix.so" in the configuration files but apparently this doesn't do anything.

I also cannot find a single pam_unix auth entry in any log file that was successful. I'm thinking that its still not reading the passwords file correctly but login and su are getting their authentication fix from somewhere else and circumventing PAM's brokenness.

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I assumed that PAM would simply provide a pluggable module security interface to programs that requested it through a set of libraries. I am greatly disturbed that it seems unable to legitimately authenticate anything. I thought that installing this would allow versatility in authentication that defaulted to what it was before but instead it just broke everything. I should have just thrown mud at my laptop. It would have been a lot easier.

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Any help in fixing this would be greatly appreciated...

Nevermind. I'm just perfectionistic, impatient, and angry. I think I fixed it all.