Can't Login In to Ubuntu VM

Question

Whenever I try to login into my Ubuntu VM from my username, it goes briefly to a black screen and then back to the login screen. I can login as "guest" though.

I can login with just the terminal with ctrl-alt-f1. I have checked disk usage there and it is not the issue. Oddly, in this terminal, some of my keys are goofy. For instance, hitting the "/" results in a "-" being typed while typing ":", "'", "{", etc results in accented vowels. I don't understand this at all--perhaps some settings somewhere really got goofed up.

I was able to login just last night and use my VM. Recently today, my computer performed some windows updates (I have windows 7) and there is a chance that they may have been the cause. I have tried creating a new VM through the vdi we were given (for a class) and the same exact problem occurs again!

Please help! Thanks.

Solution

I had the same problem; Fortunately the answer by Ames in the link below helped me fix it: Can't Log Into Ubuntu 12.04

Quote: I ran into the same issue. The problem was in the user .XAuthority file, permission was owned by the root user. I changed the file permission and was able to log back in.

Using ctrl+alt+F1, I logged into my account, then changed the ownership of the file ".Xauthority" by typing the command below in terminal: (My username is masoud, and since it was the first user I created in Ubuntu, a group named masoud was also created)

sudo chown masoud:masoud /home/masoud/.Xauthority

The first "masoud" is the username and the second one is its group. The dot before the file name implies it's hidden.

Comments

[Peter]

Btw, I am using Ubuntu 11.10 if it matters. Any thoughts on how to fix would be very much appreciated!