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I have a dual booted windows 7 / ubuntu 14.04 computer. Everything in ubuntu worked fine until I booted into windows and then switched back to ubuntu. Now when I try to login it keeps sending me back to the login screen. I logged in using the command line fine, but it appears to be a messed up path variable. On the command line I cannot use sudo or any other functions unless I do an export path.

I created a new user, which worked until I had to switch into windows again, then it did the same thing.

mikegeorgeff
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  • Windows can't mess linux like the default path. It's jsut that you are dropped in limited shell like initramfs because ubuntu does not boot correctly. – solsTiCe May 20 '15 at 18:10
  • Type in grep PATH ~/.bashrc in a terminal window and see if the /usr/bin is in the line. – Terrance May 20 '15 at 18:10

2 Answers2

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If you're saying that it is looping at the login prompt, that is the password shows no errors but returns you to the login prompt. I might be able to help. It happened to me. I don't know why.

Ubuntu gets stuck in a login loop

might help.

The code dpkg-reconfigure lightdm entered in the terminal is what did it for me. Apparently, some problem in .Xauthority file. I hope the link helps.

gman
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Gary Pearman
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If you open your .profile file, located in your home directory, i.e. /home/yourusernameor ~, using sudo gedit ~/.profile, it actually says, which files are used by your login shell.

# ~/.profile: executed by the command interpreter for login shells.
# This file is not read by bash(1), if ~/.bash_profile or ~/.bash_login
# exists.
# see /usr/share/doc/bash/examples/startup-files for examples.
# the files are located in the bash-doc package.

# the default umask is set in /etc/profile; for setting the umask
# for ssh logins, install and configure the libpam-umask package.
#umask 022

# if running bash
if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    # include .bashrc if it exists
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
          . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists
if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

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

(Typing echo $PATH in your terminal would have also given you the value of the PATHvariable.)

I neither have a .bash_profile nor a .bash_login file, therefore the command interpreter of my login shell - which is bash - executes my .profile as stated in the file. (Find out what your shell is by using echo $SHELL. Should the output be different from /bin/bash, you may be interested in in this: https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/88201/whats-the-best-distro-shell-agnostic-way-to-set-environment-variables)

Even though it says in the .profile file above include .bashrc if running bash, my .bashrcfile is empty, for example.

Therefore I included the paths to the directories of my commands like /usr/bin directly in the .profile file.

If /usr/bin is not included in the value of your PATH variable, defined in your .profile file, just add it after the other paths using a colon. The order of paths does not matter.

Part of the reason why this happened to you after booting into your other OS is because changes like permanently deleting or adding a path take only effect after reboot. So, as @solsTiCe already mentioned, Windows cannot mess with your system. "Something" else must have changed the PATH variable.

Community
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Sekin
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