Bugzilla – Bug 1021271
KDE session are not visible in who / last output
Last modified: 2019-07-11 15:19:48 UTC
Users running a KDE (Plasma 5) session are not visible in the output of "who" or "last". Same problem for IceWM session on a KDE installed system. Only open consoles (within the KDE session or in a text terminal) are listed by who/last. In a GNOME installation of 42.2 the error doesn't occur. The error was observed for the first time in Leap 42.1, persists in 42.2 and Tumbleweed but does not exist in openSUSE 13.2. Steps to reproduce: Login user A to a KDE session but do not open any console in this session. Switch to text terminal and login as user B. Check for running session of user A (who / last A).
No changes so far. Still the same error in 42.3 (Build 0257).
Configuration of pam_lastlog.so in /etc/pam.d/*?
I don't normally notice this "problem". But I did check for it once, prompted by a forum post. If I'm correct, it is an SDDM issue. Whether this counts as an SDDM bug or an SDDM feature is not up to me to decide. I normally use either "lightdm" or "gdm" for login. And each of those writes a record to the "utmp" database. But "sddm" does not write such a record. If I switch to "sddm" (as I did for testing), I still get an entry. But it is written by "yakuake", which I have automatically started for me. There isn't a record written by "sddm". My suggestion: Any of the following would "solve" your problem: (1) start "yakuake" in your plasma session; (2) start "konsole" in your plasma session; (3) switch to using "lightdm" -- you may have to install it first; (4) switch to using "gdm" -- you may have to install that first; (5) switch to using "kdm" -- you may have to install that first.
@Andreas: I'm not quite sure what you mean. pam_lastlog.so should be a compiled library but not a configuration and is located in /lib*/security/. In /etc/pam.d/* there is no file like that. But at least I can say that the error is reproducable in any fresh standard installation of Leap since 42.1. @Neil: I can confirm that using any terminal emulation in a plasma session writes the needed record obviously. Likewise other display managers than SDDM seem to be working. Therefore, I believe that you are very close to the cause of the problem. I double checked the issue on a Fedora 25 installation which is using the same SDDM version 0.14. Because the problem does not occur there, I suspect it is actually a real error, not a feature. Not using SDDM does not seem to be a good workaround, because SDDM is installed by default and therefore the error is probably relevant to the majority of all users.
Responding to comment #4. It's a long time since I last used Fedora. So I don't know what they are doing. I do have KaOS installed, and it uses SDDM. When I type the "who" command, I see two entries there. One is for "pts/0" and the other is for "pts/1". Those entries are put there by "yakuake" and "konsole" which I have open. There is nothing there from SDDM itself. By contrast, with openSUSE 42.3 Beta, I see entries where the terminal column shows "console" and ":0". I'm pretty sure that those were put there by GDM (which I use for login on that 42.3 system). I'm still not sure if what you report is a bug or a feature. But since it happens on both KaOS and openSUSE, it is surely an upstream issue.
This is automated batch bugzilla cleanup. The openSUSE 42.3 changed to end-of-life (EOL [1]) status. As such it is no longer maintained, which means that it will not receive any further security or bug fix updates. As a result we are closing this bug. If you can reproduce this bug against a currently maintained version of openSUSE (At this moment openSUSE Leap 15.1, 15.0 and Tumbleweed) please feel free to reopen this bug against that version (!you must update the "Version" component in the bug fields, do not just reopen please), or alternatively create a new ticket. Thank you for reporting this bug and we are sorry it could not be fixed during the lifetime of the release. [1] https://en.opensuse.org/Lifetime
This should be supported since sddm 0.17.0: https://github.com/sddm/sddm/pull/933