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I just upgraded from 15.10 to 16.04.

Every time I log in as my user the computer freezes within 10 seconds. But if I log in to a guest session everything works fine.

Anyone have anything I can try to get this fixed?

I thought I was dealing with a gpu driver issue since I'm using a radeon gpu and I've heard people have had issues with them on 16.04. But then I discovered that guest sessions run fine using the same driver. So now I'm not sure what to look for.


What I've tried:

  • dpkg repair during boot
  • Logging in through a TTY and running sudo chown -R $USER: ~

Aditional details:

  • The desktop loads and startup processes start before the screen freezes
  • When the screen freezes I can move the mouse at first, then the screen blacks out for a second and when it returns the mouse is frozen also
  • If I log in to a guest session after logging in to my user through a TTY the screen freezes
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    Then it's probably something in your home directory. I would start with making sure that you (and not root) are the owner of all files and directories in $HOME. Jun 27, 2016 at 19:48
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    Can you log into your user account through a TTY? Press CTRL+ALT+F1 and enter your username and password. Now would be a great occasion to fix possibly messed up file ownerships using the command sudo chown -R $USER: ~ as Gunnar just said. You log out again afterwards using the exit command and you switch back to the GUI using CTRL+ALT+F7.
    – Byte Commander
    Jun 27, 2016 at 19:49
  • Yes, I can log into my account through a TTY. I ran sudo chown -R $USER: ~ but it didn't fix the issue. The screen still freezes after logging in to my account.
    – hal
    Jun 27, 2016 at 20:20

1 Answer 1

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A last resort, when something within your home directory has been messed up, but you don't know what the problem is, is to rename it and create a brand new home directory.

Assuming that your username is moss, running these commands from a TTY would do it:

cd /home
sudo mv moss moss.old
sudo mkdir moss
sudo cp -rT /etc/skel/ moss
sudo chown -R moss:moss moss

That would allow you to log in to your user account from the login screen.

Then you could copy/move cherry picked contents from /home/moss.old.

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  • When I try to rename the directory with mv I get the error mv: cannot move 'moss' to 'moss.old': Device or resource busy.
    – hal
    Jun 28, 2016 at 16:24
  • @moss: I see. Have done this a few times myself, and never encountered that objection. Probably you need to shut down one or more applications/processes. Jun 28, 2016 at 16:56
  • I've been trying to get this working since yesterday. I can't find any processes running in /home/moss. I also tried logging in as a different user, but I still get the error.
    – hal
    Jun 29, 2016 at 15:12
  • Ok, I managed to complete the commands. But now how do I access the data from moss.old?
    – hal
    Jun 29, 2016 at 16:08
  • @moss: You use the terminal or Files or whatever... For instance: cp -rT ../moss.old/Documents Documents Jun 29, 2016 at 16:14

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