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My computer wont allow me to login unless its as guest. I have pressed Ctrl+Alt+F1 and can login using my administrator account there, but not in the normal interface. I have done updates and upgrades from the terminal, and also tried to create a new admin user, and assigned the user to the same group as the administrator account, but cant login to that user either from the normal login screen.

When I login the screen flashes black and then returns to the login screen Is there a way to view an error log file to see what the error is that is returning me to the login screen? How can I do this to figure out what the problem is?

I have also followed instructions on this page Ubuntu gets stuck in a login loop.

It looks like a similar problem, but the fix did not work for me :(

I would like to get back into my admin account and my programs but I am stuck in guest

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    Have you followed the answer correctly? If you followed the answer, please include the exact commands you have given and the output (if any). Imp. point - chown username:username .Xauthority in this cocmmand you need to replace username with your administrative account name (case sensitive)
    – Web-E
    Aug 12, 2013 at 19:15
  • My username is Administrator on the pc, there was only an administrator user and a guest option.
    – Francois
    Aug 13, 2013 at 8:20
  • I did the command: chown administrator:administrator .Xauthority and it just goes to the next line. If I look at the list of files it does say that the file is administrator, administrator, 0 bytes and -rw--------. When I did ls -ld /tmp I see that it does look like this drwxrwxrwt 15 root root 4096 Nov 30 04:17 /tmp. Should that not also be administrator administrator? I also did dpkg-reconfigure lightdm and that just goes to the next line, so I cant see if anything happens.
    – Francois
    Aug 13, 2013 at 8:27
  • Is there a way to see a log file of what is going wrong when it tries to login? Surely then I will be able to see what is failing and maybe fix that?
    – Francois
    Aug 13, 2013 at 8:28
  • You may wish to check your /etc/login.defs and /etc/adduser.conf files if you have changed your uid outside of the limits provided in those configuration files. See this answer
    – K Markey
    Mar 20, 2018 at 22:15

2 Answers 2

Reset to default
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I had the same problem. It seems there was some kind of problem in my ~/.profile file. Rename it to something else (so you don't loose it) and try logging in again.

This solved my problem.

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    This actually helped me, probably a typo in my profile and rendered my linux box unused. Have tried other fixes but this simple one made the trick
    – roy riojas
    Feb 26, 2014 at 1:13
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for me, I had mistakenly overwritten my PATH in /etc/environment. I had done something like:

JAVA_8=/opt/jdk1.8.0_121
JAVA_HOME=$JAVA_8
GROOVY_HOME=/opt/groovy-2.3.9
GRADLE_HOME=/opt/gradle-2.0
IDEA_HOME=/opt/idea-IU-171.3780.107

PATH=${PATH}:${GRADLE_HOME}/bin:${JAVA_HOME}/bin:${IDEA_HOME}/bin

So, once I got to a terminal (ctrl + alt + F1), and tried to, e.g., 'cat', I was getting:

The command could not be located because '/bin' is not included in the PATH environment variable. echoing the PATH showed me that I had overwritten my PATH, so I had to manually set PATH:

PATH="/usr/local/sbin:/usr/local/bin:/usr/sbin:/usr/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/games"

Then I could use vim (or whatever) to manually edit my /etc/environment back into a good state.

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