I've recently installed Ubuntu 10.4 - and used it quite successfully as the adminstrator user. But when I add additional users they can't login - to be exact, their password is accepted, and they get a screen with nothing except Ubuntu's pink/purple background. The mouse pointer moves around but clicking the mouse does nothing.

What could be going wrong ?

Lots of things, but you haven't provided enough information for us to help you.

So I now have some questions for you:

1] Once you had installed 10.04, did you let it apply the updates (there are many since the original release in April) ?

2] What method did you use to "add additional users" ?

3] What privileges did you give them (usually memberships of certain "groups") ?

4] What, exact, hardware are you running this on?

5] Are you running a "virtual machine", or does it boot straight to linux ?

Welcome to LQ

Thanks for your interest.

(1) Yes, I've applied updates several times, most recently last night

(2) At first, by the menus, System -> Adminstration -> Users & Groups
then by the adduser command,
the effect seems to be the same either way

(3) no groups specified - it seems the default is that each user is in a group where groupname = username

(4) if you mean m/b, cpu make and model, etc, wait until I get home; it's an Intel Pentium, 512 MB RAM, two hard disks (Ubuntu on the second one), bought 2006, a low-end system then; more details tonight.

(5) well, I think neither; Ubuntu is on two partitions, /boot and / ; I use GRUB to boot Ubuntu or something else

Regards

Thanks for that information.

I just tested this: System .. Admin ... Users & Groups. I created a new user test with PW abc123, everything else was left as the defaults.
Logged out, logged in as test - no problems

The new user is a member of the following groups: test adm dialout fax cdrom floppy tape dip video plugdev fuse

HTH

Hi,

hardware is Gigabyte 865G m/b, Pentium 4 3.0GHz 531 LGA 775 CPU.

I don't know how to find out what groups a user belongs to, how would I do that?

The groupname given to any new files is the same as the user name.

Cheers

apropos is a useful command if you are not sure what you are looking for:
apropos group
[SNIP]
groups - print the groups a user is in
[SNIP]
See man groups for more details, but to find out what groups a user belongs to:
groups username

Thanks for the tip about groups;
the newest new user test3 is only in its own group,
jeremy@home2006:~$ groups test3
test3 : test3

But the first new user I had this problem with was in a number of groups:
jeremy@home2006:~$ groups andrew
andrew : andrew adm dialout fax cdrom floppy tape dip video plugdev fuse

It seems that if I add a user by adduser it is just in the one group, if I add
the user using the menu item Users and Groups, it is in all these other groups as well

But both sorts of new users have the same login problem

OK, thanks for the follow-up.

This is not normal behaviour for 10.04, other people are not encountering it, and I think something is seriously messed up with your system
.
We could spend weeks tracking down exactly what is wrong, but I don't think I have the patience and at this stage, I'd suggest you just:

1] Re-install
2] Apply all the updates before you do anything else.
3] Reboot
4] Login as yourself, then try adding some new users using the GUI.
5] Test those user's logins.
6] Let us know how you get on.

I hope I don't have to remind you that "running the GUI as root, so I don't have to be giving passwords all the time" is a very bad idea.

Yes, I'd rather come to the conclusion that something like that might be a good idea, after an ubuntu bug report produced some requests for further information, and then silence.

I've managed to install Ubuntu 9.10 successfully (after a failed attempt, you need to delete all the
Ubuntu 10.04 stuff). Things seem to work fine there.

Trying to install Ubuntu 10.04 off the alternate CD fails - the first symptom is a complaint about one of the .deb packages, although the test-the-CD step says it's fine.

trying to install Ubuntu 10.04 off the desktop CC (which doesn't have a verify-the-CD option) produces (after a long time) a message saying either I have a faulty hard drive or a faulty CD or ... (and the same when I try all over again) - although no other system has noticed such faulty h/w.

Thanks for your interest. I plan to see if I can install 10.04 any other way.

Brief follow-up to the above. Tried to install using the instructions to create a bootable live USB using USB creator. TERRIBLY slow, in (presumably writing stuff to the USB), at one point said 500+ minutes to go.

Tried using the instructions to install from (another) Linux installation (as at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...tion/FromLinux ). When I got to the point of booting the hard disk to which I'd copied everything, the screen just went blank, except for a cursor in the top left.

My family must think I'm nuts, not just settling for Windows. If I, with 25 years of experience using Unix operating systems, can't find a way to install the latest ubuntu that actually works, it's understandable that they're not interested in using it.

Any suggestions ?

Best Suggestion: Go with Windows.

???

You have had such strange problems I wonder if you have a hardware problem. You say your PC is 4+ years old and "a low-end system".

Maybe try anything from the "Top 10" here, or even windows, even if just to confirm that your hardware is OK.

Thanks for you continued interest. Certainly there could be some strange h/w problem, but at the moment I've got Fedora 13, and as I said, Ubuntu 9.10, on it and they seem to work OK. (Mind you, it took about a month before I realised that Ubuntu 10.04 wasn't working right.)

Among the top 10 you refer to, I've also used System Rescue CD.

The rest of the family use Windows on it, quite a lot. It seems to have generally worked about as well as I would have expected Windows to work.

But on another computer running Ubuntu 10.04 I had more success creating a bootable Live USB, using usb-creator. It finished in a reasonable time and would boot up on the computer where I made it. Next step is to try this on the machine where I've had the problems.

Further on my attempts to get Ubuntu10.04 installed.

Tried using the bootable USB. Couldn't boot directly to it from the BIOS menu (pssobily for want of exploring the possible options), but seemed to be able to boot to it from GRUB.

Went through the install process until it demanded that /cdrom be unmounted, because it wanted to write to the partition table. (Why? - I'd already set up the partitions using /sbin/fdisk, all I did in the install process was identify the ones to be used as /, /boot and /home).

It turned out that /cdrom was mounted on the partition where stuff had been put in my unsuccessful attempt to install from a hard disk ("installation from Linux"). Why the gets mounted when I try to boot from the USB is quite a mystery to me.

Had another look at the instructions for doing that, at https://help.ubuntu.com/community/In...tion/FromLinux - it turned out that initrd.lz is what I wanted, not initrd.gz

So I retried this installation from a hard disk - this time it booted up, but eventually we got to the same point that it wanted /cdrom to be unmounted. When I got to a terminal window I found that the hard disk partition which I had used for this installation process was mounted at /cdrom. So when I tried to unmount it, this failed because /cdrom was in use. Well, naturally, since the installation program running was located on /cdrom.

This all seems crazy - the installation program, running from a partition mounted at /cdrom, wants /cdrom to be unmounted.

So after at least 10 hours trying various ways of installing, (and mostly trying them again), and probably the same again reading various bits of the (rather disorganised) documentation, I'm no closer to getting Ubuntu10.04 installed.

It's not surprising that at work, where there seem to be 3 full-time IT staff for less than 100 researchers, they're still using the "dapper" edition of ubuntu - maybe getting a more recent one to work is too much agony.

I find that I've quite a collection of ubuntu disks which I never succeeded in installing. To the best of my recollection when I tried to install Ubuntu 6.06 it was examining the existing partitions, when it exited with some sort of error. When I tried to install Ubuntu 8.08 (at least, that's what's written on the CD), it seemed to install OK but booting it came up with a command line login prompt - no indication of how to boot into a GUI desktop. Meanwhile RedHat 9 at least could be installed and made to work - it's just that now there are too many web pages around which are too fancy for the browsers in Redhat9.

Which Linux distros are best for being easy to install and get working? Any opinions?