During fresh install of 14.10 with existing /home partition, user is no longer able to graphical log in

Bug #1382826 reported by Christopher Barrington-Leigh
10
This bug affects 2 people
Affects Status Importance Assigned to Milestone
Ubuntu
Expired
Undecided
Unassigned

Bug Description

I installed 14.10 yesterday on a formatted partition next to a 13.04 system partition and a /home partition.

When prompted for a username, etc, I entered the same user info as existed already in /home.
Because it was the first user in both cases, the uid matched.

(Gripe: unlike Linux more than 10 years ago, it did not offer to import existing users from the existing installation).

When I booted up in 14.10, logging in through the GUI just bumped me back to the gdm login screen after a few seconds of blank screen. Logging in through a terminal worked fine.

I then tried 13.04 and had the same problem! That is, 14.10 install had actually corrupted my user account on /home so that I could no longer startx !

I eventually noticed that some files (I think ~/.dmrc and some ~/.Xauthority.*) had ownership root:root.

Thus, a workaround ended up being a
sudo chmod -R myuser:myuser /home/myuser
~on my home folder.

ProblemType: Bug

description: updated
affects: apport (Ubuntu) → ubuntu
Revision history for this message
Christopher Barrington-Leigh (cpbl) wrote :

Sorry. I'm afraid that the uid didn't match the old user's after all (1000, 1001).
Although that doesn't explain the symptom (those files were owned by root!), I cannot test/characterize the bug.
c

Changed in ubuntu:
status: New → Invalid
Changed in ubuntu:
status: Invalid → Incomplete
Revision history for this message
Beeker (bambam65) wrote :

Hi! :) I just wanted to add that in my case, I installed 14.10 over 14.04 (14.04 was working fine). After updating my AMD graphics driver, I try to login to 14.10 and I get bounced back out to login screen. I will try this solution though. Cheers!

Revision history for this message
Launchpad Janitor (janitor) wrote :

[Expired for Ubuntu because there has been no activity for 60 days.]

Changed in ubuntu:
status: Incomplete → Expired
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