I'm pretty new to Linux. I decided to install Mint, after a day or two i logged on and got the following error message.

"Your Session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged out yourself, this could mean that there is some installation problem or that you may be out of diskspace. Try logging in with one of the failsafe sessions to see if you can fix the problem.

View Details(~/.xsession-errors file)
/etc/mdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup...
/etc/mdm/Xsession: 173: /etc/mdm/Xsession: grep not found
/etc/mdm/Xsession: Executing mate-session failed, will try to run x-terminal-emulator
/etc/mdm/Xsession: 205: exec: x-terminal-emulator: not found"

I'm pretty sure i have enough diskspace, but i am stumped. If anyone has a solution its greatly appreciated! Thanks.

Hi Poweer, and welcome to LQ.

There will hopefully be suggestions as to what you can do to resolve this problem but personally, given the fundamental nature of the failure and the fact that you've only been running Mint for a couple of days, I would reinstall the operating system.

Can I ask which version of Mint you're using and where you got the iso from? Also, your computer setup (e.g. single boot and dual boot?) and how much disk space you've given Mint?

Can you remember doing anything over the last couple of days on a system level which you think might have caused the problem?

If it's of any reassurance, what you're seeing is not common.

Given that this is a freshly installed system, it's almost certainly an installation problem. The messages are associated with the Mint display manager (mdm), which is the program that gives you your graphical login in Mint. Specifically an ancillary script (/etc/mdm/xsession) is playing up. The fact that it can't find the grep program is very worrying, because this is one of the most basic programs in Linux and it should be there.

If you press ctrl+alt+F1, you will get to a text console where you can log in and explore. Start by typing which grep. This should report the location of grep; if there is no output, the installation is definitely screwed up and you will need to reinstall. Can you remember getting any weird error messages during installation?

It's also worth typing startx to try to bring the desktop up by hand. See how far it gets and let us know the result.

So, last year, the Linux Mint website was hacked and some of the ISOs were compromised.

Read about it here http://blog.linuxmint.com/?p=2994

Also, I've had similar error messages before when the permissions on the user's home folder did not belong to the user.

Potentially, this may also be caused by a partition not being mounted or not being readable. Interesting that you can still boot the computer but not find 'grep', but that can happen if your PATH variable does not include the /bin or /usr/bin paths.

So, maybe your .bashrc or .bash_profile files are unreadable or missing?

Still, best move would be to wipe and re-install from scratch, possibly with a new ISO that you've downloaded and checked the MD5 checksum.

From a web-search of some of the errors, a 'MAYBE' / my 'wild-guess': check: echo $PATH
http://serverfault.com/questions/557...-cannot-log-in
Again, just 'my wild-guess', fwiw=ForWhatIt'sWorth, from web-researchnig some of the errors.