Login loop gdm3 / Debian

[Robin Aaberg Garen]

Hi guys!

I have recently installed debian wheezy from net-inst on an old thinkpad lenovo T60. So far so good. But suddenly today when I logged in it seems that the authentication is ok, the screen goes black as it normally does before entering the desktop, but now it reenters the login screen instead.

Im caught in a login loop.

How does one go about troubleshooting this issue?

I've managed to enter the system in recovery mode, and made a second user with sudo. That user can login normally. So something has happened with the original user.

I remember that I accepted some upgrades on some packages yesterday before shutting down from the gui-package manager.

Im curios / slightly irritated on why I cannot login to gnome anymore with my main user. Have any experienced similar issues?

- Robin from Norway

[TME WTR]

Well, try this : dpkg-reconfigure gdm3

Anything in the logs (syslog, dmesg) ?

Anything unexpected returned by : lspci -vv | grep -i vga

[TME WTR]

Also, you can check :

- /var/log/apt/history.log

- /var/log/dpkg.log

- /var/log/apt/term.log

to see what happened packages-wise.

[Michael Pope]

Hello Robin,

You may want to install another desktop manager for testing, something
small like lxde, then select this in gdm session and see if you get a
desktop. I usually keep two desktop managers on my system just incase I
need to swap over after breaking something.

It sounds like it could be something in your users settings so you need
to find out if it's gdm or your desktop manager. Then once you have
found out which you can move your settings directory eg: 'mv
.config/xfce4 .config/xfce4.bak' if you are running xfce4 and test
logging in again.

from
Michael

[Brendon Oliver]

On Tue, 30 Sep 2014 04:07:56 PM Robin Aaberg Garen wrote:
> Hi guys!
>
> I have recently installed debian wheezy from net-inst on an old thinkpad
> lenovo T60. So far so good. But suddenly today when I logged in it seems
> that the authentication is ok, the screen goes black as it normally does
> before entering the desktop, but now it reenters the login screen instead.
>
> Im caught in a login loop.

Sounds to me like your desktop environment failing to start rather than a
problem in gdm. If you can login from a virtual console (or ssh in from
elsewhere), see if there's a .xsession-errors file in your home directory.
KDE has a tendency to dump errors & log info there, maybe Gnome does the same
(not a Gnome user sorry, so just guessing). If so, it might give you a clue as
to the nature of the problem.

- Brendon.

[Tim Hamilton]

I've had problems logging into gnome3 before when dconf had become corrupted.

The work around was to delete ~/.config/dconf/users and attempt to login again, gnome then recreated dconf which allowed me to login.

The downside is the loss of all your desktop settings so you may want to back dconf up in case it's not the root of you issue.

Tim

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[Wayne Moulden]

Also had problems with a loops in the past, cuplrits were relatively specific imo

1st was with a modeline I was switching too with xrandr in ~/.profile prevented the DE from starting

2nd (w/Linux Mint uses mdm) was a black screen when the 'last session' option was selected on new install instead of an actual environment. Fix was to select the environment explicitly (cinnamon) and log in.

Wayne

[robin...@gmail.com]

Thanks for some guidance. I have alot to test tomorrrow.

Cheers, Robin
Norway