Facial recognition stopped working and now cannot login

Question

I've been using Ubuntu 11.04 for a few days. I installed face authentication login(I think it's 2.1 something) with the terminal. It was working well, but now what happened a few times later is it scanned my face, passed and says 'Face verify authentication has started', for half an hour without moving. I just can't get in. Please reply, I'm really in trouble. I have to solve this problem before my school opens.

Answer 1

If you are using the pam-face-authentication system (as described in this OMG! Ubuntu article), you can disable it by going to the text mode terminal and editing a couple configuration files:

1. Press Alt+Ctrl+F1 to switch to the text console
2. Log in using your username and password
3. Edit the files /etc/pam.d/gdm and /etc/pam.d/gnome-screensaver and delete the whole line (there should be only 1 per file) that contains the string pam-face-authentication.so.
4. Now enter the command sudo restart gdm to re-start the graphics session; you should now be able to log in using only username+password.

To edit a file, you can use this command:

sudo nano "/path/to/file"

e.g.:

sudo nano /etc/pam.d/gdm