Login screen loops unless you login as Guest

Question

I am running a VMWare Player with a Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin as Guest on my Windows 7.

Sometimes I get the shutdown blue screen error in Windows, this time it happened when I was running the Player. When I restarted everything Ubuntu gave me the "Login Loop" on adminstrator login.

I log in and there's this black screen where I can only read:

piix4...smbus:0.0.0.07.3 Host Smbus controller not enabled . 

When I go to the prompt in root mode it fails to update and only upgraded, specially some plugins ( I think graphic plugins) which also appear in one an error message after quitting the prompt, but they´are successfully installed.

They are not the error message. After that I have been working with the Fail/safe Mode recovery panel.

When I try to update via Root I get errors like this:

W:failed to fetch http://extras.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/precise/release.gpg could not        resolve 'extras/ubuntu.com

There are 8 more like this referring to areas like:

-archive/canonical.com
-ppa.Launchpad.net
-security.Ubuntu.com
-Us.archive.ubuntu.com - release.gpg
                        precise-updates/release.gpg
                        precise_backport/release.gpg 

Final Message: some index files failed to download.....they have been ignored or old files are used.

The black screens most of the time pass by too fast for me to pick up any information. But in general I think I have done everything I was able to in the recovery panel including updating network and graphic packages and recovering filesystem packages and the basic stuff ( I am a beginner regarding Linux ) in the root prompt.

Now I am stuck in this screen with graphic options:

- Run in low-graphics mode just for one session
- Reconfigure Graphics
- Troubleshoot the error
- Exit to console login

I am trying to choose to reconfigure graphics but the mouse disappears in the virtual machine screen and sometimes when options change it´s only the first and last option. But this happens from the blue without messages.

This particular option menu is in the regular GUI style against a black screen in Terminal style. Really strange.

Solution 1

I am not sure if what I was experiencing is the same but maybe this will work for you.

I have Ubuntu 12.04 Server LTS updated 6-7-2012 and Desktop installed. I am also running this as a VM in vmware player, not sure if that matters or not.

I had done a ctrl+alt+F1 from desktop to get a shell. When I tried to to start the gui again (sudo startx), I got errors, then after a reboot I got the log-in and when I put in my password it would just loop no error for bad PW! But when I switched to the Guest log-in it would boot normally! What a pain, huh!

So what I did was

• switch to shell (Ctrl+Alt+F1)
• logged in as the user
• cd /home/user (I think that cd ~ will get you to the same place)
• sudo mv .Xauthority .XauthorityBak
• sudo reboot

This worked it booted normal and all is good!

There are specifics of my installation which may not apply to yours but maybe it will work.

Hope this helps, K

P.S. I got this info from http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1890457 Thanks carranty

EDIT: I started to get a System Problem Detected when I would log in from a locked desktop so I sudo chown 777 .Xauthority and that seemed to have cleared up the problem. I am not sure if this causes a security issue.

EDIT: Not sure if this did clear up the problem, things are getting funky!

Solution 2

This is the shorter version of Dig's answer, which solved my problem. root had taken ownership over my profile's .Xauthority file. In order to resolve the issue you need to assign ownership over this file back to the user.

sudo chown username:username .Xauthority

Solution 3

startx doesn't work

Seems like you lost write-rights... Check whether the solution described here will work for you. This happened to me.

I found a solution for me:

I changed my password, reinstalled xserver-xorg by typing: sudo apt-get install --reinstall xorg

After a reboot it worked for me. Notice: I removed the .XAuthority files in /home/username by: sudo rm /home/username/.XAuthority*

to get a shell try Strg-Alt-F1 when you turn on your computer. I actually got my write-rights back by using clear in recovery mode.

Comments

[Admin]

When you have multiple users, do the other users work? I have two users, the main user loops, the other works perfectly fine. Unfortunately I cannot access my data via the user but I could login as a main user via ctrl+alt+F1. Message for startx: Server is already active for display 0 Delete the locked file "filename" mentioned, then sudo reboot

[UbuntuNooBkjp]

anyone think that this might be an issue with the updates?

[Eliah Kagan]

Welcome to Ask Ubuntu! I recommend expanding this answer to explain in greater detail what you did to fix the problem, so that someone reading this answer could follow the steps provided to fix it.

[Warren Hill]

As written this does not answer the question but if you expand it to include the details as suggested by Eliah it could be good answer and help others with the same or a similar problem.

[Cerin]

This did not fix the problem for me.

[Eden]

How does this happen?