It's going to be hard for me to recreate this problem, but I currently have a system that will not start X as a user, but will as root. the message receieved is: Authentication failed cannot start Xserver Perhaps you did not have Console ownership. I've checked everything I can think of to solve this problem. Various strace's show that it is trying to authenticate... BEfore you ask.. pam-68-8 and updates from the 6.1 errata are all installed. Latestest 6.1 Xserver stuff is installed. Perhaps this is an ldap problem. - checked permission on /dev/console - checked /etc/security/console.apps - checked to see that /etc/pam.d/xserver was properly setup. - checked to make sure that the ldap.conf file is working properly. Other machines are working ok with this setup. This machine was working properly, but then crashed while using staroffice. After that it stopped starting X for users. I have removed every .Xauth, /tmp/{*,.*} and so forth that I could find. Nothing relevant is in any log files.
You solve this problem by adding the following line... session optional /lib/security/pam_console.so ... to the end of /etc/pam.d/login (which I suppose you have copied from /usr/doc/pam_ldap-36/pam.d/login). Cheers //Johan