I recently tried to access phpmyadmin and was getting an access denied message instead of a login screen. I checked /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php and everything was fine, it was not set to 'config'. I played around with some settings and nothing seemed to work. Eventually, I edited /usr/share/phpmyadmin/config/config.inc.php This had 'config' authentication type. My question is, shouldn't /etc/phpmyadmin/config.inc.php override the settings in /usr/share/phpmyadmin?
Whic exact error message do you got on the screen? Most likely your problem is not related to phpmyadmin as you might have accessed it trough a wrong vhost or path.
I don't have the exact error message anymore, but it was phpmyadmin could not access mysql, check config.inc.php to make sure you are using the correct login info. Then it has username root with password no. This indicated that is was trying to use a config file to connect rather than making me authenticate.
