Stuck at login screen with status "Logging in..."

[Mark Campbell]

I'm on 12.04 with the latest updates. The system seems to boot fine, and the login screen is presented as expected. After entering a password and hitting the Return key, status text above the password entry states "Logging in..." but no desktop environment is ever shown. I've waited several minutes, and it doesn't matter whether I choose GNOME or Ubuntu for desktop environment. This began happening a few weeks ago but has been especially bad for the last couple of days, typically requiring an average of 10 reboots before I can successfully login. I noticed today that on failed login attempts, dmesg showed the line "init: plymouth-stop pre-start process (PID) terminated with status 1" with PID being the actual PID of the process. After many reboots and a successful login, dmesg did not contain the line. I don't know for sure, but I suspect it is related. There seems to be a timing issue that for me is causing problems much more often than not. I've also noticed that for some reason moving my mouse on the login screen is VERY sluggish, and this is the case on every boot whether or not I end up being able to successfully login.

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

Thank you for taking the time to report this bug and helping to make Ubuntu better. It seems that your bug report is not filed about a specific source package though, rather it is just filed against Ubuntu in general. It is important that bug reports be filed about source packages so that people interested in the package can find the bugs about it. You can find some hints about determining what package your bug might be about at https://wiki.ubuntu.com/Bugs/FindRightPackage. You might also ask for help in the #ubuntu-bugs irc channel on Freenode.

To change the source package that this bug is filed about visit https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/987614/+editstatus and add the package name in the text box next to the word Package.

[This is an automated message. I apologize if it reached you inappropriately; please just reply to this message indicating so.]

[Mark Campbell (campbemw)]

Unsure if the issue really is with lightdm but was instructed to modify the original unspecific report so that the bug would be filed against a specific package. The closest thing I could find based on the suggestions was to file against lightdm because the problem is encountered while the login screen is displayed.

[Chow Loong Jin (hyperair)]

I was facing the same issue earlier, and finally tracked it down to lightdm not being able to access things inside my HOME directory. Specifically, it looks like the greeter was looking for my wallpaper, and couldn't access it, so it hung. Setting 0755 permissions to my $HOME fixes this.

[Sebastien Bacher (seb128)]

weird, why would it hang on access rather return an access denied though? do you use a nfs mount dir or something?

[Michael Terry (mterry)]

I was unable to reproduce. :( If someone has foolproof reproduction steps, please let me know.

[Mark Campbell (campbemw)]

Permissions for $HOME on my system are already set to 755. I know they would be helpful, but I'm not sure how I could provide reproduction steps because this happens before I am able to login; maybe someone else can. I don't have any custom scripts that run when the system boots or anything like that. The issue wasn't happening when I first installed 12.04, which I think was in early March.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.