chown username:username .Xauthority

Question

I'm stuck in a login loop Ubuntu 17.04. When I go to tty1 and type chown username:roey .Xauthority taken from Ubuntu gets stuck in a login loop

It says that my user doesn't exist.

What is the problem? How can I log back in to Ubuntu-Gnome?

Solution 1

The command is

sudo chown roey:roey .Xauthority

1st roey is the user, 2nd is the group roey

Solution 2

If you don't know what username/group you shoud use, I suggest using something like this:

sudo chown $USER:`id -gn` .Xauthority

• $USER will be expanded into your current username.
• id -gn will returns the main group of your current user.

Comments

[Joshua]

rm .Xauthority and allow it to get recreated

[Zanna]

+1, but you will need sudo if it's not yours already and btw the second roey is superfluous as just adding the colon after the first one changes the group as well

[Roey]

to finish this press ALT+-> several times (in my case it's 6 tty's so 6 times) until you get into the Ubuntu-Gnome login screen and login.

[cat]

@Roey Also CTRL+ALT+F7

[David Foerster]

Are you sure you don't mean $USER:`id -gn` (note the colon character in the middle)? Also, that would be equivalent to just $USER: since chown uses the primary group of the specified user if you omit the group name.

[Ravexina]

@DavidFoerster Both : and . will work fine, didn't know about omitting group like $USER:, good point +1 :-)

[Ravexina]

check info coreutils and the section which is about chown. I'll change it to : in case of username contains dot.

[David Foerster]

Indeed: “New scripts should avoid the use of `.' because it is not portable […].” Looks like we both learned something today. :-]

[Ravexina]

Yeah, I just used it to show an alternative approach and it caused us to learn something new :)

[Rafael_Espericueta]

That didn't fix my problem, sadly.

[Rinzwind]

@rafael but did you also get the same error notice? Have a look at the .xsessions_errors file in your home