Password not recognized
 

I was playing Open Arena and the desktop crashed. I had a huge and fuzzy desktop and couldn't do anything, so I tried to reboot. Upon reboot, my password wouldn't take me to my desktop. I can put in a bad password and I will get a message saying that the password is incorrect. If I put in the right password, the desktop goes black for a second and comes back to the login screen with no message.

(Note: I have had Zorin loaded for three or four months and this is NOT a password or caps lock problem!)

All I could do is reload Zorin (ver 6.1). That didn't help. So I made sure I formatted and reinstalled Zorin. Same problem.

(Note: This is NOT a Zorin problem!)

My /home directory is on a separate partition. I believe there is a corrupt file in there somewhere. Before I reloaded, I was able to log in as a different user and use my non working login to get to my account, so the account is fine. SOMETHING in my /home directory is hosing the graphics, I suspect, since I can access the account other ways, but cannot login to a desktop (any of them) under that ID.

Anyone know the first places I should be checking...????

Logout. Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login as yourself.
switch to graphical login with Ctrl+Alt+F7 (I think most systems it is F7).

Let us know...

I was able to input the command and nothing happened, which should have meant that it was successful. I exited the command line back to the GUI login screen, but the password still didn't work. I went back to the command line and put the command in one more time and this time it returned the message

mv: cannot stat '/home/brian/.config': No such file or directory

However, I think that just meant that it did what it was supposed to do the first time, it renamed ".config" to ".config.org" and ".config" isn't there anymore. However, I am in /home/brian and I don't see the file, although that might be because it is hidden. (If that is what the dot does at the beginning.) By the files I see, it is in my directory on the /home partition, which should be correct.

I just did a cd into ~/.config.org and see that it is a directory and not a file.

For no reason, I input "passwd" and changed my password. I exited back to the GUI and input it and it flashed some lines (as it has been doing all along, too fast to read), and returned to the login screen. So it apparently can't make a desktop for me. I think whatever config file does that is what got hosed.

So by renaming that (adding the .org), was it supposed to blank me and enable a new configuration to be written at login?

something similar happened to me, in my case after installation I was able to log in the first time, I installed some software and updated all my applications to the latest version, I logged off to allow the updates to take place and when I tried to log back in I was no able.

However I was able to open another session in text mode using ctrl+alt+f2 once there I issued the command to create another user 'useradd'
then I set up a password for the new user with the command 'passwd <newuser>'

I made sure my new user was member in the same groups as my original user so I could have the same rights. You can list the groups of your user by typing the command group <user> in a terminal.
Since I did all that I have been login in with my new user. The account I created during installation still cant get log in to the graphical mode.

I have no idea what is going on with Ubuntu but I have been reading on the web people with similar problems, so far I havent been able to find a solution. I still have that account but I dont use it anymore.

Good luck to you

Thanks! I, too saw similar problems and no solution. Unfortunately, that account is very old and goes back several different distributions. All of my stuff is on it. I think I will make up another account and move things into it slowly and reboot frequently. I expect documents and things to move without any problems. I think I'll try to move the suspect folders into the second account and if I can narrow down which folder hoses that user, maybe someone will know what is in it and what might be corrupted.

I could be way off base with my suspicions about Open Arena, but in order to run, it changes graphics. My ungraceful exit probably resulted in a file that is usually some kind of combination of opened/rewritten/saved at exit not going through the proper sequence and that resulted in the corruption. If I have anything useful to report, I'll definitely drop it here, because I won't solve it myself, but someone might get some insight and put a couple of things together that might help some people in the future.

Thank you for your input, folks, and I will continue to check. Heck, I'll try just about anything at this point!

Billy:

~/.conf is a directory.
I usually include this command but I omitted it for the least impact ruleI normally (when I had those issues) mv'd both ~/.config and ~/.gconf to .org

It's still worth a shot.
NOTE: This should reset your desktop panel settings to default values.

Worse-case scenario, it doesn't work and you can mv them back to originals.

Please let us know...
NOTE: .gconf is a directory also.