[PLUG] Authentication denied: User doesn't exist 521

[MJang]

On Wed, 2010-11-03 at 23:29 -0700, John Jason Jordan wrote:
> On Wed, 3 Nov 2010 23:10:32 -0700
> drew wymore <drew.wymore at gmail.com> dijo:
> 
> >On Wed, Nov 3, 2010 at 11:07 PM, Russell Senior
> ><russell at personaltelco.net> wrote:
> >>>>>>> "John" == John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> writes:
> >>
> >> John> However, after the install a number of programs will not
> >> John> launch. Frequently I get the error message "Authentication
> >> John> denied: User doesn't exist 521."
snip
> >
> >Cat /etc/shadow and it should give you the UID of your user and who
> >the mysterious account assigned 
> 
> Cat /etc/shadow does not work. I can't copy and paste the error message
> from the terminal window because the copy button is grayed out.
> Basically, it said "permission denied" so I repeated it as sudo,

If Bill's suggestion does not work, this may be time to boot into
runlevel 1. Haven't tried F13, so I don't know if the option readily
exists from the GRUB menu -- but if it does (this works with older
versions of Fedora -- and RHEL 6 beta)

1) Boot the system
2) When a message like "press a key within 5 seconds" appears, do so
3) Press a (or p to enter a password, then press a)
4) In the line that appears, type a space followed by 1, press Enter
5) Press b to boot into runlevel 1
6) A command line should appear -- you'll be the root user. You should
then be able to run [cat /etc/shadow]

Thanks,
Mike