Authentication Failure Switch to greeter

17,586

Solution 1

As per Michael Durrant's comment above and this post:

$ sudo apt install --reinstall lightdm
$ sudo service lightdm restart

Note: Running this command will log you out of your system. So, make sure to save your work before that.

Solution 2

I resolved the issue by a simple restart.

17,586

Jonathan

Doing Geolocation at ipdata.co

Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

Jonathan over 1 year
I'm experiencing a very annoying problem on Ubuntu 18.04.

Whenever my laptop resumes after being suspended I'm completely unable to login and get the error;
```
Authentication Failure Switch to greeter
```
The issue is well described here, although it seems no one has found a solution to it.

https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/unity/+bug/1733557

Is there any way to stop this from happening?

Update:

To anyone who comes across this, the shortcut to get to the greeter without having to reboot is Ctrl-Alt-F1.

Also if anyone of the people who voted to close this question had actually read the bug report above they'd see that users still report the same issue after upgrading to 18.04.
- Aryo Adhi almost 6 years
  
  As long as you can access your account via tty, you can bypass it by this way: askubuntu.com/questions/557833/how-to-unlock-locked-session/‌…
- Jonathan almost 6 years
  
  Thanks. This at least saves me having to do a reboot every time which is awesome!
- Jonathan almost 6 years
  
  I'm hoping someone will post a permanent fix for this.
- Jonathan almost 6 years
  
  To anyone who comes across this, the shortcut to get to the greeter without having to reboot is Ctrl+Alt f1
- Michael Durrant over 5 years
  
  I would like to reopen and post that you can use $ sudo apt install --reinstall lightdm $ sudo service lightdm restart
- David Foerster over 5 years
  
  @MichaelDurrant’s comment works according to Angela’s bug report command.
- Jonathan over 5 years
  
  @MichaelDurrant How to re-open this?
- Elder Geek over 5 years
  
  @MichaelDurrant The post is open and awaiting your answer. Cheers!
Vlad Savitsky over 5 years

One time problem solved by reboot but then appears again. Suggested solution works for me.
mindreader over 5 years

WARNING: This works well. However, issuing these commands will log you out of the system. So, make sure to save your work before running these commands.