Cannot get past login screen

Question

I have lubuntu 12.04, and it was working fine until I installed something and I do not remember exactly what I installed because I was trying to build a ruby gem and it required a lot.

now I rebooted and I cannot log in, well, I can but when I do LXDE apparently cannot continue and returns to the login screen.

I created another user from my console screen (I can login there), and the other user can login. So I removed my .* directories from my home directory, but it did not help.

Any suggestions?

Answer 1

In my case the cause was that ~/.Xauthority was owned by root.

EDIT:

$ ls -l ~/.Xauthority
-rw------- 1 root root 61 Sep 16 15:43 .Xauthority
$ chown group:user ~/.Xauthority

where 'group' and 'user' are the group and the user that you use to login. in my case:

$ chown akonsu:akonsu ~/.Xauthority

Answer 2

I just had the same problem with an upgrade to 12.10. It turns out that the ownership of the files in home had been switched, probably because I used my normal login account when I did the upgrade. i.e.,

all the files in /home/administrator had ownership of {name}:{name}
all the files in /home/{name} had ownership of administrator:administrator

My guess? The account numbers (1001/1002 iirc) had been switched.

Anyway, I ran the following:

sudo chown -R administrator:administrator /home/administrator
sudo chown -R {name}:{name} /home/{name}

where {name} is the name of the account (redacted to protect the innocent)

Answer 3

This worked for me (12.10 Lubuntu - can login as guest fine, but logging in as self just keep getting returned to the login screen):

1. Ctrl + Alt + F1 to get to terminal
2. sudo passwd > to change password
3. sudo apt-get install --reinstall xorg
4. I still can't login at this point, so back to terminal
5. cd /home/<user> (I think that cd ~ will get you to the same place, instead of type the name of your directory)
6. sudo mv .Xauthority .XauthorityBak (renaming this file, I don't know why)
7. Now it works :)

I think the problem may have been caused when I accidentally killed an X-Server process in the Task Mngr before logging out

See also Login screen loops unless you login as Guest

Answer 4

It was quite unclear what caused this problem. In my case, I found solution this way:

cat ~/.xsession-errors

sudgested that there might be problem in:

~/.xinputrc

So I deleted all suspicious lines in this file and now I can login into my profile.

My ~/.xinputrc looks like this now:

# im-config(8) generated on Sat, 26 May 2018 08:17:25 +0200
run_im none
# im-config signature: 1264bec9f4f189d30a13a35aa127a285  

May be this can help anybody...

Answer 5

I get the same issue. But I could use Wayland on version 18.04.3 LTS to get to the desktop.

I just reinstalled xorg

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xorg