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How do you fix being unable to login to Gnome-Shell?

I upgraded to 14.04 from 12.04 on a Macbook, and after some initial trouble configuring video, I was finally able to get the Nvidia driver to work and login as normal. My system was running fine for several weeks until after a routine package update that didn't require a reboot, when I suddenly became unable to login to Gnome-Shell. I only discovered the problem when I did Alt+F2 and entered "r" to reload Gnome-Shell to test how much memory would be freed up.

Instead of reloading all the windows on my desktop, it closed everything and kicked me back to the lightdm login screen. From there, trying to login just makes the screen flicker, briefly shows me the Nvidia logo, then kicks me back to the login screen.

I've tried all the solutions mentioned here, for similar problems logging in, including:

  • deleting my ~/.Xauthority file and rebooting
  • reinstalling the ubuntu-desktop package and rebooting
  • ensuring everyone has access to write to /tmp
  • ensure all files in ~ are owned by me
  • checking ~/.xsession-errors for explanation (nothing's listed)
  • checking my ~/.bashrc, ~/.profile and ~/.bash_aliases files for any strange commands that might be erroring out. I haven't changed these between when I could login and when the problem started.
  • running sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm and rebooting
  • running sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm and rebooting. I don't even get a login screen after that.
  • check /var/log/Xorg.0.log for errors. I found none.
  • check /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log for errors. I found none.

None of these worked for me.

The only thing I discovered that worked was I can successfully login as myself into Unity. I can also login to Unity as guest, although neither a brand-new user nor guest can login to Gnome-Shell.

So it definitely seems to be a Gnome-Shell issue, but I'm not seeing any explicit errors that would tell me what's wrong. What's really strange is I haven't changed or installed anything new that would have make this break all of a sudden. How do I diagnose this?

I only have two shell extensions installed, system-monitor and alt-tab, but they've been there for weeks without issue. What would be stopping me from logging in to Gnome-Shell?

My installed graphics packages reported by dpkg --get-selections |grep -v deinstall|grep -i nvidia are:

nvidia-340                  install
nvidia-340-uvm                  install
nvidia-opencl-icd-340               install
nvidia-prime                    install
nvidia-settings                 install
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Cerin
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1 Answers1

0

Unfortunately, as mysteriously as the problem began, so did it end. I was forced to use Unity for a couple weeks, performed a few standard updates with apt-get, and then when I tested gnome-shell again, it worked.

Cerin
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