12.04 keeps on reverting to login screen after successful login

[motorsep]

I've had Ubuntu 12.04 since it came out. Everything was fine until recently. Today I was trying to log in as usual, but after successful login with Unity desktop, I only saw a glimpse of the wallpaper on my desktop and was immediately reverted back to login screen. No matter what I did, I could bot get into my Unity desktop. Logging into Gnome I didn't experience a single issue.

Has anyone had something similar before? Any idea how to fix it?

Thanks.

[carl4926]

If you create a new user as a test subject
Can you login to Unity with that?

[zombifier25]

Press Ctrl + Alt + F1, log in and run this command:

sudo chown yourusername:yourusername .Xauthority
replacing yourusername with your user name.

See if it helps.

[motorsep]

Thanks, will try and report what happens.

[motorsep]

Ok, tried both methods.

zombifier25's method didn't work :(

I logged into my wife's account with no issues, with Unity being desktop environment. So I am puzzled why only my account goes promptly being kicked back into log-in screen :/

[carl4926]

Ok, tried both methods.

zombifier25's method didn't work :(

I logged into my wife's account with no issues, with Unity being desktop environment. So I am puzzled why only my account goes promptly being kicked back into log-in screen :/
Some settings got messed up
It can be tricky to solve

Before now, in my early days, I backed up my personal files. Deleted my user (inc. the /home/user)
Then recreated the account and put my files back

[motorsep]

Ouch.. Can't do, because my whole development environment will get messed up and I don't have time to restore initial setup.

It sucks :(

[p-dh]

I looked this up @ Askbuntu (http://askubuntu.com/questions/130387/stuck-at-login-screen) and found several solutions for you.

You can check out /var/log/lightdm and see if there is a specific error message.
You can simply delete the .Xauthority in your home directory (or rename it).
You can change to gdm - sudo dpkg-reconfigure gdm - and attempt to log in.
Another post (http://askubuntu.com/questions/130265/ubuntu-12-04-hangs-on-login) mentioned stopping and starting lightdm (Ctrl-Alt-F1 -- sudo stop lightdm -- sudo start lightdm).

Hopefully, one of these will work for you.

Paul :cool:

[trondert]

Had a simular problem with 12.10, couldent log in me, but quest could login just fine.

Ended up deleting:


.Xauthority and .XauthorityBakThen i could log in, with som settings fubared tho...

EDIT: and i had to chown the new .Xauthority after logging in again

[motorsep]

Ok, nothing of that helped me.

What I noticed was that I had Osmo and Psensor loading on startup in my account and none of the other accounts had those. So I logged into my Gnome account, removed those two.

Another thing I noticed was that as soon as I launched Chrome, it would kick me out to login screen from Gnome.

I am not sure 100%, I think my video drivers got messed up. I uninstalled older ones, 310.19 and installed 310.32. During uninstallation process, Nvidia unistaller told me that drivers were modified. I am puzzle how could that happened. Either way, here I am in my account, writing from Unity desktop :)

Thanks!