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Fedora 18: Can't Unlock the Screen

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Marco Mornati
Author
Marco Mornati
I build, self-host and sometimes break software in production — writing about AI tooling, coding agents and infrastructure.

After the latest Fedora updates I’m getting a boring problem with the unlock: I can normally login after the startup but not after a lock screen (CTRL + ALT + L for example).

The Problem
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Looking into log you should find something like the following:

Mar 25 13:33:15 notebook gdm-password][12579]: AccountsService-WARNING: Failed to connect to the ConsoleKit seat object: No space left on device

It’s a gnome-shell bug, as described here: Red Hat Bugzilla #872118. But in this way my desktop is completely useless.

I found two different ways to workaround/fix the problem.

Solution 1: Kill Gnome Shell
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Connect with root on a new terminal (CTRL + ALT + F2), and here kill the gnome-shell process.

mmornati@notebook ~$ sudo ps aux | grep gnome-shell
mmornati  1967  6.4  3.9 2041492 156052 ?      Sl   21:15   1:25 /usr/bin/gnome-shell
mmornati  2127  0.0  0.3 739228 14552 ?        Sl   21:15   0:00 /usr/libexec/gnome-shell-calendar-server
gdm       3531  0.5  2.0 1425268 78348 ?       Sl   21:28   0:02 gnome-shell --mode=gdm
mmornati  4570  0.0  0.0 109184   884 pts/1    S+   21:37   0:00 grep --color=auto gnome-shell

mmornati@notebook ~$ sudo kill -9 3531

The problem with this solution is that you have to execute a manual task each time we want to unlock Fedora screen.

Solution 2: Increase inotify Watches
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A second method consists in changing a parameter of the inotify process to allow more watches users. I’m not sure, at the moment, if this could cause some others problems, but for me it works now.

To do this, create a new sysctl configuration file for inotify, for example inotify.conf with this parameter inside:

mmornati@notebook ~$ cat /etc/sysctl.d/inotify.conf 
fs.inotify.max_user_watches=100000

All should work correctly now!

Enjoy