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The login screen shows and i choose myself. Then the screen goes black, and the login screen shows again.

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  • This would be the kind of question where knowing what preceded your problem may lead to the answer. Did you install new packages? Did you mess with GDM configuration? Is this a new install, or were you able to get it working before?
    – emf
    Oct 13, 2010 at 5:51
  • The thing that preceded my problem is that i upgraded 10.04 to 10.10. I didn't mess with gdm configuration.
    – Arvid
    Oct 13, 2010 at 19:29
  • Even though this is an old thread, if anyone is having this problem and looking for a answer, see the link below where the same question was answered well with an easy fix. askubuntu.com/questions/223501/…
    – user151976
    Apr 25, 2013 at 7:55

6 Answers 6

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No answer, but this may be related to one of these two bugs:

Login Loop problem with 10.10

or Hitting send at login seems to restart X

I had a problem with GDM restarting (once) each time when trying to log in after upgrading to Maverick Alpha, upon installing GDM on top of an existing ubuntu Server install.

The solution for me was to remove GDM and GDM configuration files and reinstall.

ONLY RECOMMENDED if you can't get another solution.

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I just had this exact problem with Linux Mint 10 Julia, which is based on Ubuntu. Login to tty1 console works, but not the graphical login (login loop as OP described).

The problem was in the /etc/profile file. 

#... stuff   
if [ "$PS1" ]; then
  #... more stuff
fi

. /path/to/file/that/does/not/exist #raises an error and interrupts the login

umask 022

Once I removed the ". /path/to/file/that/does/not/exist" line, the login loop would stop and I could login to my desktop again.

So, make sure your .bashrc, .profile, /etc/profile files etc are clean and don't raise any errors that interrupt the flow.

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  • This was my problem--although it wasn't a missing file, I think it might have been a function definition (which worked when I would load it via . .profile, not sure why it broke things at startup).
    – weberc2
    Jan 11, 2015 at 21:11
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Possible problem might have been that the /tmp directory has been removed or its permissions changed.

  1. Press Ctrl-Alt-F1 and go to the terminal.
  2. Create the directory by mkdir /tmp.
  3. Change the permissions by chmod 777 /tmp
  4. Ctrl-Alt-F7 and come back to the login screen and login.
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A common source for this problem is a full harddisk. Try switching to a Terminal (CTRL+ALT+F1) and log in. Now run

sudo apt-get clean && sudo apt-get autoclean

which should give you some space. Now log out and go back to the graphical login-screen (CTRL+ALT+F7 or F8 or F9) and try again.

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  • It says E: Invalid operation auto-clean When i run df it says i have 9G free disk space.
    – Arvid
    Oct 11, 2010 at 19:47
  • The correct command is 'autoclean', not 'auto-clean'. Also, some part of the disk (a % relative to total partition size) is reserved for the root user, which might well be 9 GB on a large disk.
    – JanC
    Oct 12, 2010 at 2:50
  • I've managed to login by choosing safe mode from grub, then choosing root prompt, typing the root password, and running startx.
    – Arvid
    Oct 12, 2010 at 15:42
  • If i type "login" and login as myself after entering the root password, and then run startx, it results in a black screen. If i try to login as root at the gnome login screen, it bounces back just as when i login as myself.
    – Arvid
    Oct 12, 2010 at 15:49
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If you have a livecd, can you run a disk check (from the command line) on the disk? I've had systems do this before because of bad permissions, and a simple disk check fixed the problem.

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Autologin worked fine for me, but not afterwards. I fixed it thanks to https://askubuntu.com/a/63697/42522

sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

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