Solved: error message "localhost kdm_greet[15114]: Can't open default user face"
 

This was a very frustrating error, which costed me the better part of my day.

When I wanted to restart KDM, I got the login screen where I entered my userid and password. X would show the hourglass for a few seconds and then the login screen re-appeared.

The ~/.xsession-errors file contained only these lines:

and the /var/log/syslog told me this:
This is an error which is reported quite often, but hardly a working solution is found.

In my case the reason was that the /tmp directory permissions on my machine were drw-r--r-- while it should have been drwxrwxrwt.

The command for changing it is:After changing the permissions KDM worked fine again.

What confused me is that /etc/X11/Xsession script does contain a line which does a check for writability of /tmp, however I did not find the error message that Xsession oughts to generate. So I assumed that it was not the writability of /tmp.

jlinkels

Thank You.
 

Thanks for posting jlinkels, you saved me time.

thanks
 

that was very helpful.

Thank you, thank you, thank you!

I have no idea what may have caused the permissions to my /tmp to get so messed up but this solved my problems!

You'r welcome. If you think this post was useful, please click the Thanks button.

jlinkels