wwwhizz' blog Jan Kazemier & his music, photography, nerd-projects, developing, electronics and gadgets

su: Bad item passed to pam_*_item() fixed

I had a problem when trying to su. Everytime I tried to su it gave the following error:

su: Bad item passed to pam_*_item()

Since I didn't find my solution on the internet (the only solution I could find was removing wrong entries from /etc/environment), I'll post mine here:

I had a floating equals-sign in

/etc/default/locale

You should check that file, it should only contain something like

LANG=en_US.UTF-8

If that doesn't fix your problem, you might want to check your /etc/pam.d/su for strange entries.