Help! Can't log in

[bilkay]

After trying a "fix" I found on another thread, nobody can log into my laptop! After each attempt, a single message shows up in /var/log/messages:

Aug 19 11:44:46 ubuntu kernel: [ 52.459328] type=1503 audit(1282232686.548:17): operation="open" pid=1613 parent=1399 profile="/usr/share/gdm/guest-session/Xsession" requested_mask="r::" denied_mask="r::" fsuid=1000 ouid=1000 name="/home/${USER}/.profile"

$ cd
$ ls -l .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 ${USER} ${USER} 702 2010-08-17 16:02 .profile

$ cd /usr/share/gdm/guest-session
$ ls -l Xsession
-rwxr-xr-x 1 root root 91 2010-04-14 19:24 Xsession

Background:

The initial problem was an error message on login: Can't update /home/${USER}/.ICEauthority, and it was taking a long time to get past it.

Here's the "fix" (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1366173&highlight=.ICEauthority):

This worked for me:
Use a Ubuntu Live CD to boot up, and choose a command-line (shell) option.
With this, set your $HOME directory (/home/username) permissions to something appropriate (I used 755) and make sure all directories can be listed with the "ls" command. Then remove nautilus with

sudo  apt-get remove nautilus

and delete the .ICEauthority entry in $HOME, and possibly in /var/lib/gdm. Then reboot with

sudo  shutdown -r now

When you choose the same option on boot-up, from the command line you can use

sudo apt-get install nautilus
 sudo shutdown -r now

and retrieve the CD a bit smartish. I do hope you get a clean straight boot and login, as I did!
with thanks to all who helped me,
Phil

The only thing I did differently was I booted into recovery mode from the grub menu rather than from live CD.

[bilkay]

Further note: The gdm login screen comes up, but after login attempt, black screen with text flashes up too fast to read, then returns to gdm login screen.

[mikewhatever]

It looks like you've picked very poor instructions. I am going to report that post as potentially harmful and ask it edited, as deleting .ICEauthority is a bad move.
Take a look at a proper explanation -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=206985.

[bilkay]

It looks like you've picked very poor instructions. I am going to report that post as potentially harmful and ask it edited, as deleting .ICEauthority is a bad move.
Take a look at a proper explanation -> http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=206985.

Okay, we can all agree that I screwed up by assuming that if something worked for someone else, it would work for me. But what now?

BTW, I tried restoring the ~/.ICEauthority files from backup with no luck.

[bilkay]

$ cd
$ cat .xsession-errors
/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
Setting IM through im-switch for locale=en_US.
Start IM through /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/all_ALL linked to /etc/X11/xinit/xinput.d/default.
/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
.: 34: Can't open /home/${USER}/.profile

I don't see any reason why ~/.profile can't be opened.

$ cd
$ ls -l .profile
-rw-r--r-- 1 ${USER} ${USER} 702 2010-08-17 16:02 .profile

[bilkay]

It's crashing out of /etc/gdm/Xsession in this loop:

if [ -d /etc/X11/Xsession.d ]; then
for i in `ls /etc/X11/Xsession.d/` ; do
if [ -r "/etc/X11/Xsession.d/$i" ] && expr "$i" : '^[[:alnum:]_-]\+$' > /dev/null; then
. "/etc/X11/Xsession.d/$i"
fi
done
fi

In script 99x11-common_start:

exec $STARTUP

[bilkay]

At this point, STARTUP = /usr/bin/ssh-agent /usr/bin/dbus-launch --exit-with-session /usr/share/gdm/guest-session/Xsession

It's not getting to the script /gdm/guest-session/Xsession. Now I'm stumped

[mjones1984]

I too followed Flos Headford's advice (http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1366173) and now cannot login. From what I can tell, running Klamav or clamav with 'sudo' caused the issue in the first place. To clear the "could not update .ICEauthority" message I used

sudo chown [username]:[username] /home/[username]/.ICEauthority
sudo chmod 664 /home/[username]/.ICEauthority

(where [username] is my username) and then restarted. This let me get into gnome but I couldn't interact with anything even though things were running (i.e. CPU usage graph). Then I followed Flos Headford's advice and found myself at a login screen that would point back at itself on login (accepting my username and password but falling back to the login screen on success). For anyone considering deleting .ICEauthority and reinstalling nautilus, do this as a last resort. I was running Ubuntu 10.04LTS at the time and will resort to reinstalling the whole system as a result.

[bilkay]

What I find disquieting is that a single, seemingly innocuous file deletion can cause so much havoc, and based on the lack of responses, can't be remedied.

[zuerston]

Please use clamtk 4.15 GUI and not have these problems.