Can't login

Hello!

I'm having some problem with my Zorin, when im at the login screen i type in my username and password, and the screen goes black then im back at the login screen again, and it keeps doing this. so i can't get in.

(theres a note in the top right corner wich says: Gnome power (..?) something isnt installed correct.)

If you plug an ethernet cable and run dpkg, you don't have to update afterwards. The updating (and the package fixing) is done while dpkg is running.

swarfendor437: Believe it or not im not a complete moron, although i am new to linux =)
Thank you for the tip but I tried your other suggestion by booting recovery mode and typing "dkpg" it updated and all, but still find myself stuck at the login screen...

Hi,

have you tried changing the session type at the login screen??, see if you can do that and if it helps, once fully booted, disable the login screen to see if there is a broken package somewhere by running the following command in a terminal:

sudo dpkg --configure -a

Then enable your login screen again!!.

Did you install the graphic card drivers via the hardware section in the control center??. (ATI and Nvidia only!)

Regards Wolfman

PS: Swarfendor437 is not implying that you are a "Moron" so please refrain from making such remarks in the future, he made a good valid point about "Lock Caps"; nothing more!!.

I've tried with changing the session, but nothing happens.

I havent installed the drivers at all, i was gonna do it after the rebooting but now i cant get in so..


(Yeah i know its a common misstake to have capslock on, and i didnt mean to implay that Swarfendor437 was calling me a moron..sorry)

Well the thing is i used a USB stick, and it all went really well and used it for a couple of days. then one day i couldnt log in anymore.
Is there an easy way to re-install it? Cause i didn't really change anything or so..

I used "live" and installed it from there.
Version: Zorin OS 5.2
Machine: Intel Pentium D CPU 3.00GHz (2 CPUs)
Software: unetbootin-windows-568

I've encountered this problem as well, with identical symptoms as Gimmesumdeath has described. I've have been using Zorin OS 5.2 for the past week and a half without incident, then yesterday when I performed a reboot, suddenly I couldn't log in, either. The symptoms are just as he describes: When I boot up Zorin, I'm prompted for my password in the usual fashion. When I type it and press enter, the screen goes black for a moment, then I'm right back at the login prompt. No error message shows up or anything.

Some more details...
1) If I provide an incorrect password, I'm told it's invalid and allowed to try again as normal. This only occurs when I give the correct password.
2) Switching session type does not change the behavior. I've tried all the options.
3) I've booted in recovery mode, and ran the package repair utility. No errors showed up, and the summary showed zero changes.
4) I've attempted to log in using the "light" graphics setting in recovery mode, and the same behavior occurs.
5) I am able to log into the command line in recovery mode just fine; just not the desktop.

Like Gimmesumdeath...
1) I installed Zorin OS 5.2 using a USB flash drive formatted using Unetbootin.
2) I am definitely not running in Live mode, as I re-purposed my flash drive shortly after installing Zorin.

Unlike Gummesumdeath...
1) I have installed the drivers for my video card.

One thing I did notice before I rebooted is that Wine had stopped working for me. The Windows application I already had running continued to function just fine, but any new Windows applications refused to launch. No error message; they just silently failed, which is one of the reasons why I was rebooting in the first place. How relevant this is to the problem, I can't fathom, but I thought I'd bring it up just in case.

I've enjoyed using Zorin OS, and have found that it to caters to my methods as a habitual Windows user better than any other distro I've tried (Fedora, Mint, Ubuntu). It would be very nice if I could recover from this issue, as I've spent the last week and a half learning and acclimating to Zorin. It's disheartening to consider having to reinstall it and start over from square one again, after coming this far.

Thanks in advance for any advice you can offer.

Try this.
At login screen press ctrl+alt+F1.
The terminal screen will appear.
Give your username and password to log in.

Then write

Code:

sudo rm ~/.Xauthority

and click <enter>

then press ctrl+alt+F7 to get back to the login screen and try again to log in.

Thanks so much for the help, you guys...

@swarfendor437
I tried your suggestion, and it complained about my putting "grub" at the end, so I just did a plain old "apt-get update" instead. It ran for a while, made a few updates, but sadly the behavior persists.

@madvinegar
I did as you proposed, but there was no ~/.Xauthority file to remove. (I double-checked using ls -a.)

However, one thing I noticed while implementing both your suggestions: When I drop to the command line like that, I find that I have lost all my PATH information. When I typed "sudo", for example, it came back and gave me the path to the sudo binary (/usr/bin). To run any of the usual commands, I had to provide the fully qualified path. Is that typical?

Just to make sure that your username has the ownership for the login, in the command line (ctlr+alt+F1) type

Code:

ls -l /home

Do you see your username??

If not, you have to change the ownership to your username. So do the following:

Code:

sudo chown -R yourusername:yourusername /home/yourusername

(replace the "yourusername" with... your username! i.e. Syndog).

Then (ctrl+alt+F7) and try to login again.

I checked on the home directory as you suggested, mad. Sadly, it came back with pretty much what you'd expect...

Code:

drwxr-xr-x 60 syndog:syndog 4096 May 1 04:25 syndog

Hi,

this post may help you:

http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1861940

Regards Wolfman

Thanks for the link, Wolfman.

One of the posters in that thread suggested creating a new user account at the command line, so I went ahead and tried that out. The new account also encountered the same behavior when I tried to log into X. Is there a global configuration file similar to ~/.Xauthority that all accounts rely on?

I am going to insist on trying to remove the xauthority.

Try this

Code:

sudo su <your username>
cd ~<your username>
sudo rm .Xauthority*

Also, try this solution. It may be a problem of the lightdm.

http://ubuntuforums.org/showpost.php?p= ... stcount=11

madvinegar wrote:I am going to insist on trying to remove the xauthority.

And I am going to tell you the same thing I told madvinegar when he made the same suggestion. There is no ~/.Xauthority file to remove. I checked using ls -a, and there is no such beast.



I'll give the lightdm solution a go as soon as I can. Thanks!

(Edit by Wolfman: Be nice, MV is trying to help and making silly comments is not necessary!)

See also:

http://sourceforge.net/projects/webadmi ... ic/4511172

Syndog wrote:

madvinegar wrote:I am going to insist on trying to remove the xauthority.

And I am going to tell you the same thing I told madvinegar when he made the same suggestion. There is no ~/.Xauthority file to remove. I checked using ls -a, and there is no such beast.



I'll give the lightdm solution a go as soon as I can. Thanks!

(Edit by Wolfman: Be nice, MV is trying to help and making silly comments is not necessary!)

Sorry Syndog, I just wanted to double check through a similar command. Try the lightdm solution and let me know.
Wolfman, thanks for the support!

Excuse me Wolfman, but my question was valid. I've already moved on from this issue by reinstalling Zorin on another partition. The only reason I'm still pursuing this is because I want to help you, the Zorin community, figure out what's really going on in the hopes of improving this distro. If you insist on censuring my posts, then I'll just give my polite farewells and move on.

Mad, thank you for your continued help. I'll give the lightdm solution a go.

I have been searching through the web and this non-login problem comes down to three possible solutions.

1) The "xauthority file to be deleted" solution.
2) The "get-back your ownership" solution.
3) The "lightdm" solution.

I really hope that the last solution works for you, so as to get down to the root of the problem and assist others with similar problem. And there seems to be a lot of them!

No need to argue over this. We are all on the same team!

madvinegar wrote:I have been searching through the web and this non-login problem comes down to three possible solutions.

1) The "xauthority file to be deleted" solution.
2) The "get-back your ownership" solution.
3) The "lightdm" solution.

I really hope that the last solution works for you, so as to get down to the root of the problem and assist others with similar problem. And there seems to be a lot of them!

No need to argue over this. We are all on the same team!

Well said, Mad. And just to clarify, I wasn't intending to be snarky at all. I was asking a sincere question in case you had a different angle that I wasn't seeing.

I tried the lightdm solution, but apt-get came back saying it couldn't find the lightdm package when I ran the following line...

Code:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall lightdm unity-greeter

I believe I found the ppa for this package (https://launchpad.net/~lightdm-team/+archive/ppa), but unfortunately I've got to rush out the door for work. Will give it another go as soon as I get the time.

Ok, please keep us posted!

Afaik; Zorin uses GDM (Gnome Desktop Manager), if you want to use LDM, don't forget to select it during the install process if it is to be your default login manager!.
(I don't know if LDM will work in G2?; so don't remove GDM!!)

Regards Wolfman

madvinegar wrote:Ok, please keep us posted!

Well, upon rebooting into the problem Zorin partition this morning, I was presented with an interesting turn of events: Now I can't get the login screen to show at all. Looking through all the startups, I find the following failure...

Code:

Starting load fallback devices           [fail]

I'm not sure if this is the culprit or not. I can only assume that something I did during yesterday's attempt triggered this. Either that or it's been doing this all along, and I just didn't see it because I was focused on getting to the login screen. Whatever the case, I suspect that install of Zorin is pretty much hosed at this point.

Thoughts? Opinions?

swarfendor437 wrote:Hi Syndog, perhaps your avatar is causing some angst!

You know what? You're not the first person to suggest this!

I dunno, maybe you're right. All the same, this grinning bulldog and I have been through a lot together. He's kinda been my trademark wherever I go online for several years now. I guess if I insist on keeping him, I'll have to be careful to step extra lightly!

Cheers!

Hi,

assuming you installed G3 along with LDM, go here and look at the Ubuntu 11.04 section of the post:

http://www.ajopaul.com/2011/04/26/ubunt ... gnome-2-x/

You will have to do this as root!!.

Step 1: Follow the below steps to remove gnome 3 and revert to Gnome 2.x.

sudo apt-get remove libgtk-3-common
sudo apt-get install ppa-purge
sudo ppa-purge ppa:gnome3-team/gnome3
sudo apt-get install gnome-panel

Step 2: Reboot and you should be back to good old classic gnome. In case you don’t find gnome back again. try this.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get install ubuntu-desktop
sudo apt-get install gnome

See also the 3rd option here:

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=1618

Regards Wolfman

swarfendor437 wrote:It's user choice at the end of the day; personally (and I mean personally) if that had happened to me early on I would have ditched and reinstalled - but hey, that's me!

I must agree on that. Especially after all the unsuccesful efforts of fixing it. I am very sad that nothing worked.

madvinegar wrote:

swarfendor437 wrote:It's user choice at the end of the day; personally (and I mean personally) if that had happened to me early on I would have ditched and reinstalled - but hey, that's me!

I must agree on that. Especially after all the unsuccesful efforts of fixing it. I am very sad that nothing worked.

Sadly, I must concur. Let me just say that I appreciate everyone's input and effort in helping to diagnose what went wrong. Hopefully the record of our continued brainstorming in this thread will help the next poor sap who stumbles across this issue.

Meanwhile, you'll be glad to know my second install of Zorin is working without any problems (*knocks on wood*), and has become my OS of choice on my home PC. Granted, it may be one small step for mankind, but it's a significant step for this disenfranchised ex-Windows user.

Thanks again, everyone!

Glad to hear you got it working.

Any further comment from the original poster or can we mark this as "SOLVED".

Regards Wolfman

Gimmesumdeath wrote:Hello!

I'm having some problem with my Zorin, when im at the login screen i type in my username and password, and the screen goes black then im back at the login screen again, and it keeps doing this. so i can't get in.

Just to let you know that you are not alone in the Universe!

Yesterday I installed zorin 6 RC and had exactly the same problem. It persistently refuses to accept my PW on log in and bounces me back to the login page. I have checked all the usual things like caps lock etc. I know it is the right PW because I use it for all OS which I install for review.

Interesting thing is - I can log in as a guest and then, using exactly the same PW, make changes to settings, mount drives go sudo, and do all sort of things that all require the same PW!!

Go figure ..

Can I just check that:

1. You checked the status of the checksum of the *.iso after download using winmd5free from winmd5.com;

2. You used imgburn as advised in Install announcement and burned DVD at slowest speed possible.

So far I have not had any issues on logging in - apart from when I missed off one special character after I pressed 'Enter'!
(I've been having issues with Windows logon at work - turns out my brain acting faster than my fingers - or is it the other way around? )

I did check the checksum but I'm not familair with the products you mention. I burned the DVD at 2.4X using K3b which i think is far and away the best product for this out there. This is the slowest speed I can get on any of my PCs.

The first burn died with a hang up at the "Creating User" stage of the install. I downloaded again and burned to a different DVD - everything seemed to install fine on the second occasion.

Since researching this issue I find hundreds of similar posts re Ubuntu's going back to 11.04.

Most seem to show that the first fix is to get to the login screen; open a second terminal; go into to the home directory and delete or rename the .Xauthority file in your home directory. Might need to sudo : :- $sudo rm ~/.Xauthority.

This has fixed many installations so I'll give it a try when i can get onto my test PC. There are some other suggestions - none of which have anything to do with the checksum or burn. I would recommend anyone with this issue to try my suggestion above and/or Google for "Can't login to Ubuntu"

Hi arjay,

did you check this out before you started using Z6 RC??.

viewtopic.php?f=6&t=2054

Regards Wolfman

madvinegar wrote:I am going to insist on trying to remove the xauthority.

Try this

Code:

sudo su <your username>
cd ~<your username>
sudo rm .Xauthority*

Thank you this solved problem for me on zorin 8.

Problem showed up when playing with ubuntu one