Problem at Boot...ICEauthority and Nautilius???

[robbrownu]

(apologies in advance if I"m posting in the wrong spot...this is my first time on this board)

My new install of Ubuntu on my Dell PC had been working fine until this morning.

It gets to the login, I enter my password and get the following errors. After a long pause, where it seems to freeze on my password login screen, the message says:

1. Could not update ICEauthority file /home/robert/.ICEauthority
2. There is a problem with the configuration server. (/usr/lib/libconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256).
3. Nautilus could not create the following require folders: /home/rober/Desktop, /home/robert/.nautilus. Before running Nautilus, please create these folders or set permissions such taht Nautilus can create them.

Rebooting in recovery mode doesn't solve the problem. I also went to the boot screen and tried a few of the obvious selections (freeing up space, fixing errors, etc.).

I've read a few threads, and it seems like there's an obvious fix to this that involves creating some folders using command prompts. Problem is, I'm an ubuntu noob, and don't know exactly what steps to follow.

Can someone give me step/step instructions on what to do? I frankly don't even know what Nautilus is, and I'm willing to uninstall it if that's easy (and one can provide instructions).

Thanks!
Rob

[robbrownu]

uh oh...may have made the problem worse.

I followed some of the suggestions in the following chain of posts here. Using this, I was able to log in, but I entered what seems to be a perfectly clean version of Ubuntu...with no access to my files.

http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1553056&page=3


Some of the commands I entered in the terminal included:

sudo chown -R Robert:Robert /home/Robert

AND

sudo nano /etc/gdm/custom.conf


Anyone got any other ideas?

[ajgreeny]

From your post #2 note that your username will be robert, not Robert. Usernames can not have uppercase letters.

Try again with
sudo chown -R robert:robert /home/robertnote the lower case for robert in all places.

[robbrownu]

Thanks for trying to help. I'm really banging my head against the walll!

hmmmm....typed in that command with the lowercase r, and am still not finding any files. It booted right up, but when i log in, nothing of my old files or settings is there....

Any other ideas?

[ajgreeny]

I note you have another thread on this subject which starts half way in. This may well be confusing for people, so please don't do that if you can avoid it in future.

Can you please post here the output of
ls /homewhich will show all the users you have made, either on purpose, or by mistake. We can then try to sort out your problem a bit further, as I do not think those files and folders will have been deleted, just moved somewhere, and now hidden from you.

[robbrownu]

Thanks for responding.

Typing ls /home only lists one user: robert

[robbrownu]

One more thing I found another command recommended by another chain of posts, that suggested printing the output of ls /home. This is that output:

total 16
drwxr-xr-x 4 root root 4096 2010-11-22 15:58 .
drwxr-xr-x 22 root root 4096 2010-12-26 09:07 ..
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-11-22 15:58 .ecryptfs
drwxr-xr-x 28 robert robert 4096 2011-01-01 08:57 robert

Hope this helps

[ajgreeny]

What exactly was that command you typed? Open a terminal again and use the up cursor key if you can't remember, to scroll through previous commands used.

You seem to have an encrypted filesystem in there
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root 4096 2010-11-22 15:58 .ecryptfswhich is not in my list of entries in /home. Otherwise all seems to be OK.

Did you have an encrypted /home originally, as if so that may be the main difficulty I am having? If that is the problem, I am afraid I can't help any further as I have never used encryption on a file system, and have no idea where to go from here.

I still believe that the files are in there somewhere, but how you can actually get to them is another thing entirely. I would suggest to you, however, that in future you don't just type commands you have found on the internet without asking what they do first. We could probably have avoided a lot of this headache for you, if you had asked first, and then acted more slowly.

[robbrownu]

I've not encrypted anything knowingly!

I know I acted hastily. I was in a rush to get to a document I couldn't access, and my misplaced confidence convinced me it'd be "easy" once I saw that there were similar problems on the message boards.

The command that I typed to get the second reading where you saw the encrypt file was

ls /home

[ajgreeny]

You must, therefore have some aliases in your ~/.bashrc file (or ~/.bash_aliases), as the command ls /home would normally just show the folder names, ie the usernames on the system, without all the other info shown, and certainly not the three root entries yours shows. That normally needs ls -la /home

Do you have many of these customisations on your system? This may be a total red-herring, as it still should not make any difference to this encryptfs problem, but I just want to try as far as I can, though I am running out of ideas.

Just a final thought; try running nautilus as root with the command gksudo nautilus to see if any other files and folders become visible that way

[robbrownu]

forgive me....i'm a bit of a noob. Can you elaborate on what you're asking me to do? I'm not familiar with Nautilus.

[ajgreeny]

I am suggesting you start nautilus with root permissions from terminal using the command
gksudo nautilusthen just search around a bit to see if you can find your files and folders.

Just make sure you are careful, as if you delete any files from there, you will definitely be lost, so simply search around a bit.

Another thought; if you can remember the names of any missing files, use the commands
sudo updatedb then
locate <filename>and you might be lucky and find where they are. I don't hold out too much hope, however, but you never know!

[robbrownu]

Opened Nautilius via the terminal. The window opened, and there were some files available, but only operating systems related files. I couldn't find my folder in there.

Got the following code in the terminal:


robert@robert-OptiPlex-GX260:~$ gksudo nautilus
Initializing nautilus-gdu extension

(nautilus:1973): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL' failed
eedesktop.ConsoleKit.Manager.GeneralError: Unable to lookup session information for process '1973'
Nautilus-Share-Message: Called "net usershare info" but it failed: 'net usershare' returned error 255: net usershare: cannot open usershare directory /var/lib/samba/usershares. Error No such file or directory
Please ask your system administrator to enable user sharing.


(nautilus:1973): GLib-GIO-WARNING **: Missing callback called fullpath = /root/.config/user-dirs.dirs


(nautilus:1973): GConf-CRITICAL **: gconf_value_free: assertion `value != NULL'

[Qazjap11]

Have exactly the same problem. I'm quiet sure the problem is that the encryption isn't mounting (check ~ folder by la). I'll update if find a solution :)

[johnaaronrose]

I am now getting 'Problem with configuration server /usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check exit with status 256'. I've tried logging in with Session of 'Failsafe Gnome' - sometimes it's OK & sometimes it isn't.

PS I first used sudo chown user:user /home/user/.* to correct the.ICEauthority problem following advice in thread
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=10405265#post10405265
Perhaps I should have used sudo chown /user:user /home/user/.ICEauthority rather than sudo chown user:user /home/user/.*
I've subsequently tried sudo chmod 1777 /tmp, which made no difference

[johnaaronrose]

Login is now working fine. I found a message (I've forgotten where) about 'deleting' .ICEauthority. The suggested method is:
mv /home/user/.ICEauthority /home/user/.ICEauthority.bak
(where user is your login id).

This has the advantage that the .ICEauthority file can be restored by
mv /home/user/.ICEauthority.bak /home/user/.ICEauthority
even if the above method doesn't work.

Since both my login users only gave a 'blank' desktop (i.e. no menus or quick launch icons) when I attempted the standard login, I logged into the user with administrative privileges by changing the Session (at the bottom of the screen) to root login (i.e. not one of the Gnome ones) after selecting/keying in the login id but before keying in the password.

After login I discovered that a much smaller .ICEauthority file had been created (1kb versus 60+) for that user. I opened a Terminal & repeated the command for my other user but with sudo before mv. I then restarted and was able to login for my first Administrative user, logout & login successfully for my second Desktop user.