Rocky 9.6 update changed my login screen/password. I can't login

Rocky Linux Help & Support
1

Hey there… I have just upgraded to Rocky Linux 9.6. I can no longer login at the computer. My usual welcome screen has been changed completely, although it seems to still be running sddm. I usually login to a Plasma desktop but it will not accept my password, although it uses the custom icon that I had for me as a user.

I can still ssh into the machine as I always did (and it DOES recognize my password) and I can get root access, but only for the command line. I am at a loss as to what I can do! I tried to use an older kernel, but it also was sending me to the new login screen.

2

Since you can log in as root, do that. Then change your user password to whatever you think it should be and try to log in after that.

3

Hi! Thanks for your reply. I did that from an ssh session, and as root, I changed my own password. I rebooted and tried to use the password, and I got the exact same result. No login.

For the record, there is also no way to change session type from the login screen.

This is frustrating.

4

I am also receiving sporadic errors from my mouse/keyboard, when I login on the machine with Ctrl+Alt+F3 (I can get a terminal like that):
logitech-hidpp-device 0003:046D:4091:00005: hidpp_root_get_protocol_version: received protocol error 0x80

So, it makes sense that it is my keyboard

5

Well, that’s not it.

6

What happens if you log in to a terminal session as your username and start your desktop session from there?

7

I have been furiously working away at this… I didn’t try that, exactly, but I did install gdm and enable it as my display manager. Gdm comes up and works just fine for logging me into Gnome on the machine… (Yay). Now: I will need to find a way to make KDE Plasma work with Rocky Linux 9.6 (It was working until today). I misstated the problem. But I thank you very much for your efforts to guide me to the correct solution.

8

So, it seems that the reason that I could not login to Rocky was that I had sddm as my display manager, but since my KDE update is broken (that’s a whole other matter), it couldn’t log me into anything, and it kept showing me the default prompt for login. I really REALLY don’t like gnome at all, so I will have to find some other solution to that, but for this, I can lay it to rest.

Thanks Frank!