MX boots to login screen only

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JayM
Qualified MX Guide
Posts: 6793
Joined: Tue Jan 08, 2019 4:47 am

Re: MX boots to login screen only

#11 Post by JayM »

Shutdown then power up again, attempt to login as your user, then log in as root and look at /var/log/lightdm/x-0.log and /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log, or better, copy and paste their contents here. Those logs should tell us if it's an issue with the desktop manager if they show what happened when your user login attempt failed.
Please read the Forum Rules, How To Ask For Help, How to Break Your System and Don't Break Debian. Always include your full Quick System Info (QSI) with each and every new help request.

liex26
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:12 pm

Re: MX boots to login screen only

#12 Post by liex26 »


liex26
Posts: 7
Joined: Sat Nov 24, 2018 9:12 pm

Re: MX boots to login screen only

#13 Post by liex26 »

skidoo wrote: Tue Feb 05, 2019 2:28 pm Belham, yes we can notice recurring similar lightDM issues across Debian and Ubuntu also.

Debian Bug report logs - #814760 randomly fails to start

Debian Bug report logs - #776462 session fails to start when .Xauthority is root-owned

https://bugs.debian.org/cgi-bin/pkgrepo ... ge=lightdm

https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bugs

Maybe it would be helpful to add a routine into the logout(?) shutdown script, providing a warning if any non- user owned files are present in the user's home directory (and check permissions of the ~ directory)... and proactively apply recursive chown to fix.
This post from this thread viewtopic.php?f=93&t=48385 actually got me logged in.
I had several files owned by root in there, I chown to my user and it logged in. However, now there are windows open that won't close and it appears that my themes and compiz settings are causing issues.

Belham
Posts: 25
Joined: Sun May 15, 2016 7:23 am

Re: MX boots to login screen only

#14 Post by Belham »

Hi liex26/skidoo,

I finally got MX-18 to boot into my (already) saved user account.

At first, I noticed .Xauthority and .ICEauthority somehow would end up with root ownership when I'd upgrade from 17 to 18. Not sure what is happening there, because it did this from a fresh install (this morning) of 17,which was fully updated, and then made the upgrade to 18. I am at a loss how I am seeing this and the MX-team doesn't see it.

Anyhow, at lightdm login screen, and not being able to login to the user, I hit Ctrl-Al-F3 to get into the shell. I enter the user name and password, and arrive at a $. If I enter "startx"
the first thing that comes back is:

mktemp: template "failed to create a file via tmp/serverauth.XXXXXX Permission Denied.

Of course, what follows is a bunch of "xauth" errors.

Well, this has me scratching my head at how it can happen from the above scenario. So, I immediately enter root, and then typed "chmod 1777 tmp".

Once I did this, I typed "exit" to get back to the user, and typed "startx" again.

This time (though x0rg would not start and I couldn't get to a desktop), the error came about "locking authority file /home/luc/.Xauthority".

To solve this, I simply said to heck with things, and re-entered root by via "su -" (not sudo). Then I entered this command: "chown -R (username:username) /home"

Enter "exit" again.

Back at $, I entered "startx", and voila, MX-18 booted into the user & desktop like nothing is/was wrong.

What has me befuddled is how in the heck this is happening from MX-17 (a fresh install and upgrade of) to MX-18.

So far, I haven't experienced any other problems, but I've a bad feeling I'm going to encounter problems doing the above recursive command on "/home" like that.


Hope this helps, and that you get yours sorted out to where it runs better.

maggied
Posts: 4
Joined: Thu Nov 28, 2019 9:58 am

Re: MX boots to login screen only

#15 Post by maggied »

Belham

THANKS SO MUCH for pointing me to the answer! My system locked me out in exactly the same way after trying to upgrade the nvidia driver.

As I had only installed the nvidia graphics card (GT 710) a few weeks ago. I decided to remove it and go back to the onboard graphics while troubleshooting.

Eventually, after much testing and frustration, I found was able to login at lightdm as another user on the system, rather than root as you did, so I was lucky in being able to search for an answer and eventually found this thread.

Indeed, several files/folders in my home directory had been reassigned to root so your answer guided me to do "sudo chown -R maggie:maggie /home/maggie" and all was back!

My system distro is MX-18.3_x64 Continuum May 26 2019.

My kernel is now 4.19.0-5-amd64 #1 SMP Debian 4.19.37-2~mx17+1 (2019-05-15) x86_64 GNU/Linux.

I intend to try to replace the nvidia card and try again, but for now I'll just stick with the onboard graphics until I have a bit more time to do that. Now I'm not sure whether to simply uninstall all the nvidia packages as I'm worried about the dkms/kernel related elements.

The upgrade had problems matching the modules - Debconf showed
error configuring libcuda1:i386:
does not match the nvidia kernel module currently loaded (version 390.116). The X server, OpenGL and GPGPU applications may not work properly.
The warning suggested unloading the nvidia module after rebooting. I tried this but there was no nvidia module loaded. That's when I decided to remove the card (and the /etc/X11/xorg.conf file).

Sorry, I know this nvidea issue is now off the topic of the thread but just wanted to give a little background.

Very many thanks again Belham. You've saved a lot of heartache. I sooo didn't want to do a complete reinstall!

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