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So I came to start up my computer as usual and was prompted to log in unusually. I couldn't log into my account or the guest account. It just kept bringing me back to the log in screen. I then searched for solutions, of which I tried

sudo chmod -R u+w /home/[username]
sudo chmod -R ug+rwx /home/[username]
chown -R [user-name]:[user-name] /home/[user-name]
sudo mv .Xauthority .XauthorityBak

None of these worked so I then created a live usb with boot repair on it, but still nothing.

These might make sense to some people though:
http://paste.ubuntu.com/12336440
http://paste.ubuntu.com/12336605

How can I fix this login issue?

Byte Commander
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mattwesti
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    Your fixes were rather making everything worse than solving the problem. One may not just chown -R its home directory or set permissions equally to all files in there. Some special files/directories need special permissions or to be owned by root to work! – Byte Commander Sep 11 '15 at 12:24
  • Yep, I can understand that. You may realise, that I'm not completely Linux savvy. I tend to search for solutions and then just throw them into the terminal. – mattwesti Sep 11 '15 at 12:31
  • I know and I've already seen many doing that mistake. I'm currently writing a question myself on how to revert such mistakes easily: http://askubuntu.com/q/672907/367990 – Byte Commander Sep 11 '15 at 12:41
  • So, do you think that I have changed certain things that I shouldn't have and that reversing them will be an issue? – mattwesti Sep 11 '15 at 12:50
  • Reversing them will solve the additional problem (that is maybe not noticeable yet) you created by trying those "fixes". The original problem will still be there though, but I am not sure about how to approach that yet. You should definitely restore the xauthority file: cp /home/YOURUSERNAME/.XauthorityBak /home/YOURUSERNAME/.Xauthority. That will also keep your backup copy. – Byte Commander Sep 11 '15 at 13:03
  • ok I've done that. have been reading possible solutions all day, but can't quite get anything to change. Looks like I will go in via a USB ubuntu and back up the files I want and then install from new. – mattwesti Sep 11 '15 at 22:05

1 Answers1

-1

try to install

sudo apt-get install gdm

and

sudo apt-get install lightdm

Ravan
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arvind
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  • tried those two. the gdm came back with unable to locate package gdm and the lightdm came back with sub process /usr/bin/dpkg returned error code (1) – mattwesti Sep 11 '15 at 21:54