This is an issue that has irritated me enough that I feel I should post my work-around. On Ubuntu (I’m not sure since what version – I’m currently using 9.04 Jaunty), I’ve noticed that every once in a while, gnome-screensaver would hang when I tried to log back in. Let me clarify a little. When you lock your computer, it fades out, that’s gnome-screensaver (assuming you’re using GNOME of course). When you move your mouse or hit a key and you are prompted for your password, that’s gnome-screensaver as well.
The problem is, there are times (however few) that I’d enter my password, and it’d just sit there. Everything would be disabled and it’d act like it was simply pausing due to an incorrect password.
But it’d never unlock.
As long as you know what the application is that’s running, you can kill it. Going off of a hunch, I hit Ctrl+Alt+F1 to go to TTY1. I logged in under the same user, then typed the following command:
1 | killall gnome-screensaver |
This successfully gets rid of the login screen. Simply hit Ctrl+Alt+F8 (or whatever TTY your X session was running on), and tada!
Of course, you’ll have to run gnome-screen saver again or you won’t be able to lock your computer. Hit Alt+F2 and type “gnome-screensaver” to have it run in the background as it was before. It may also be a good idea to go back to TTY1 and log out, since you never want to leave a terminal wide open unprotected.
If you’re worried that someone might use this to bypass your login, don’t worry. They’d have to either log in as you in order to kill gnome-screensaver on your session, or they’d have to log in as root. And if they’re root, you have nowhere to hide anyway.
![[FSF Associate Member]](/images/fsf-member.png "[Mike Gerwitz - FSF Associate Member]"){kind=small}