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I am running a very nearly fresh Gnome version of 12.10, with no particular tweaks or customisation. I performed an upgrade yesterday using

sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get upgrade

which completed successfully. After rebooting, I find that I am no longer able to log in - entering my (correct) password brings up a black terminal for a couple of seconds as usual and then returns me to the login screen. So far:

  • The guest account can log in fine
  • I can log in to a terminal via Ctrl+Alt+1 etc
  • Deleting all my gnome profile entries (.gnome, .gnome2, .gconf, etc) does not help
  • A new empty user (created using $ sudo adduser newguy; sudo passwd newguy) has the same problem

  • /var/log/syslog has some odd messages including

    gdm-simple-slave[1219]: WARNING: Child process -1838 was already dead

    WARNING: Failed to give slave programs access to the display. Trying to proceed

  • I installed kde-standard and had the same problem, so it is not a Gnome issue
  • Running startx from the terminal available through Ctrl+Alt+1 brings me to a working desktop. If this is allowed to go to screen-saver or is locked, I am unable to wake it (I get an "Authentication Error" message below the password entry field).
  • Opening a terminal in a guest session, running su - myusername and entering my password and gives the error setgid: Operation not permitted

I surmise that something about the Ubuntu login is broken, at least on my system.

Any suggestions will be most gratefully received...

Jorge Castro
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Jeff Winterbourne
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1 Answers1

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I've just solved this problem for me. It turned out there was probably a problem with certain permissions on my home dir. I remembered changing the permissions on my home dir. Because I have an encrypted home dir I couldn't change permissions on individual files, so I did the following.

alt f2 to get a tty

Login using normal credentials

sudo chmod 755 /home

That solved the problem for me. Now I just have to look for some sane homedir permissions.

EDIT: Taking it somewhat easier on the permissions

BakaKuna
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