Ubuntu
lightdm package

After upgrade to 11.10, I can't access my account

Asked by Kent McNaughton

I'm trying to get fully upgraded to 12.04 from 10.10. I upgraded to 11.04 and used the machine for a day, then to 11.10 last night. Entering the password to my account shows me a "Could not update ICEauthority file /home/kent/.ICEauthority" (which I'd been seeing with 10.10, but didn't prevent me from logging in). The button on this warning message indicates "Log out", which, after pressing, flashes something quick on a console screen then immediately brings up another login screen. Ad infinitum. The password is the correct one and Caps Lock isn't on.

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Kent McNaughton
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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#1

Boot to root recovery mode (Hold shift at boot, select recovery mode, select root), then run:

chown -R kent:kent /home/kent; reboot

Should now be ok. Do commands like:

sudo nautilus
and
sudo gedit

sound famliar?

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Kent McNaughton (kent-panamanow) said : 		#2

Weird permissions problems! I attached and booted from another drive I had, then mounted the updated 11.10 drive that failed. Using ls -la /mnt/home/kent (my acct), the permissions for .ICEauthority were root:root and the rest were set to another user--a user that was present on the boot disk, but not on the mounted disk!! I reset the permissions to with chown/chgrp and went thru the same mounting exercise as above. My home perms came back 1001:dev!!

Changed the perms back to kent:kent.

Rebooted and went into recovery mode, where I added 2 users using adduser; one a normal user, the other a system user, as an attempt to sneak into the system using one of these users following a reboot.

Rebooted and logged in as myself. No errors this time. The 11.10 system came up with all my files intact. The only thing missing was my desktop wallpaper. Weird! Maybe I'll have to stop smoking those funny cigarettes.

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Kent McNaughton (kent-panamanow) said : 		#3

Thanks actionparsnip! Yes, familiar it is. But still strange stuff!

Revision history for this message
actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#4

 Do commands like:

sudo nautilus
and
sudo gedit

sound famliar?

Revision history for this message
Barry Drake (b-drake) said : 		#5

sudo gedit is OK NEVER do sudo nautilus. gksudo nautilus is OK.

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actionparsnip (andrew-woodhead666) said : 		#6

Neither is ok, use gksudo for ANY gui app. Sudo is ONLY for CLI based commands. Technically you can use gksudo for both.

Using sudo for GUI apps is what causes this issue.