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I recently installed latest Ubuntu 17.10 (studio flavor) on Thinkpad laptop. Have not installed anything on it yet, still, after several hours of working, now after I enter password on logon screen, I see line /dev/sdb5/clean, ... flashing for a moment and get back logon screen.

Recovery mode says APT is ok, filesystems are ok. In CLI consoles I can login, startx writes timeout in locking authority file /home/... and does not start GUI. I can however start X as root (sudo startx). I tried to add new user - also cannot login in GUI.

I found maybe related: cannot-login-after-running-startx-and-rebooting, maybe I did run X as root, do not remember, however, doing sudo rm .Xauthority did not help (I did the command as my user, not root).

What can be cause of that problem? I want to have stable working laptop and ready to investigate.

Alex Martian
  • 670

2 Answers2

3

The comment from link in question helped.

  1. At the login screen, press control+alt+F3.
  2. Login
  3. sudo rm .Xauthority
  4. sudo rm .ICEauthority
  5. sudo reboot

Looks like running X as root makes the .Xauthority and .ICEauthority files owned by root as described in linked post.

Alex Martian
  • 670
0

If yours is an older box (you've been using the same computer for a while and regularly upgrading to newer and newer OS versions) this can happen because your root directory on the filesystem is completely filled up.

Can also manifest as a "Login Loop" where you get stuck on the login-screen even with a correct password.

How to verify that space is an issue

  • Open tty login with Ctrl+Alt+F3 (will bring you to tty3)
  • run startx as non-root
  • read the logs and see if there's anything says "unable to close", or "no space available"
  • run startx as root
  • once the GUI opens, run Disk Usage Analyser and check if you have space on \

If space is not the issue, you can check:

Steps to fix the issue

jlouzado
  • 645