Cannot login after update to 4.3

I had 4.2 and did dnf refresh followed by dnf update.
Then the sddm GUI screen has the funeral flowers, so I guess it upgraded to 4.3
But cannot login, password is rejected. Bot into console mode, and cannot login as user or root.

Short News announcement

The instructions.

In the instructions we tell people that dnf update is wrong way to do this distribution upgrade. We also show there is more to this than one command. If my guess is correct this was easily avoidable. Now this becomes a wonderful learning experience.

Best guess is that at the end of your dnf transaction you were asked some quesions and the way you answered wiped your /etc/shadow file. That file contains all your passwords and user information.

So your system is recoverable but you will need to set new users and passwords even if they are the same ones you had. Start with internet search “Linux how to recover root password” and find a tutorial on this you like. You will need to recover/set a new root password first and go from there.

You will want to add at least one user as well. You can do internet search for “Linux How to add user from command line”.

This all assumes I have correctly guessed what caused your issue. If I am correct you don’t have any users either and you have to enter the uname in sddm login screen.

1 Like

@jeepster try this. Hope it helps you situation.

thanks for that procedure. After login to Plasma I get a lot of errors about files not writeable. I think when you adduser, it assigns a different UID to your user name, so no permissions for anything. So also have to do a chown -R for .config and .local directories.

I found in the past what worked better was to reinstall linux from DVD and do manual partitioning, use the old partitions without formatting. Then during installation, create the same user. Then all the config files were still there ready to go.