Can't login after installing 11.10 [closed]

Question

Possible Duplicate:
Cannot login to my user account

This computer has had Ubuntu on it for quite some time, and after several upgrades, the OS started getting a little creaky. I decided to reinstall, but I wanted to keep my files, which was easy because /home was in a different partition.

During the installation, I chose to reformat my / partition, and use (but not format) my /home partition. I also ended up changing my password to something more secure. The install seemed to go OK, so I rebooted into the system.

I was presented with the new login screen, which I filled out and tried to log in. The screen flashed to black, sometimes showing a virtual terminal, and then put me back to the login screen. This happens regardless of whether I choose the "Ubuntu" or "Ubuntu 2D" session.

I switched to a virtual terminal and was able to login, but found my home directory empty, save two files telling me how to decrypt my drives. I ran the decryption command, and my files showed up. I assume because my password changed, this no longer happens automatically.

I'm running an ATI Radeon HD 5830 card on a 64-bit processor.

TL;DR:

• I can no longer login to my computer.
• My home directory no longer decrypts automatically.

Answer 1

The login problem might just be a stale .Xauthority file in your home directory. Login on the console using <Ctrl>-<Alt>-<F1>, and delete it and any variations:

 rm .Xauthority*

That's an authorization "cookie" used by the X server. I had the same after an update. No idea why it's not automatically cleaned up or overwritten. Possibly might have something to do with update changes due to lightdm. http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/hardy/man7/Xsecurity.7.html

Answer 2

Same problem but I couldn't find a .Xauthority file in my system but when I listed my home directory

ls -l /home

the owner and group that was appearing were respectively 1002 and 1002. I just had to change the ownership with the real username

sudo chown -R myusername:myusername /home/myusername

and that solved the problem.

Answer 3

Removing it (.Xauthority) on a fresh install with a previous encrypted /home worked for me.

I had the same issue with a different computer but same scenario (encrypted /home). This time it was an upgrade from 11.04 but I had the same error. I then change the owner/group to my user/group, as it was root.root, and that fixed the issue.

Answer 4

I had the EXACT same symptoms even after deleting all Xauthority files and purging gdm. I narrowed the problem down to my .profile file in my home folder. I had a bit of code in there for tab completion for Python pip, and I vaguely recall seeing occasional errors/tracebacks with 11.04 due to missing braces/brackets -- perhaps the line continuation '\' is causing problems? Anyhow, after more than 24 hours of digging around, I finally isolated the issue and can now reproduce the problem reliably. The bottom line is: 11.10 might not be as tolerant to errors in .profile code as 11.04. If in doubt, replace your .profile with the default version and see what happens.

dpaste code here

Pip Tab Completion