Can't login!

gtoman · 07-24-2006, 05:57 PM

i have ubuntu 6.06. when i try to login i get an error msg saying:"

"GDM couldnt write to your authorization file. this could mean that you are out of disk space or your home directory couldnt be opened for writing. in any case, it is not possible to login in. contact your system administrator."

i tried it a couple more times and it keeps doing the same thing. by the way, it's on a 120 GB hard drive.
Any ideas?
thanks, Jim

Vincent_Vega · 07-24-2006, 07:17 PM

When was the last time you logged in? Have you done any system maintenance during your last session that may have caused this problem? Can you log in as root or some other existing account?

gtoman · 07-24-2006, 08:28 PM

thanks for the help.no, i havent done system maintenance since i installed only 5 days ago. I logged in yesterday with no problem. i tried logging in as root today and it wont accept it. it keeps going back to the boot up screen. so, theres only 2 accounts, root and the one i set up with my name.

Vincent_Vega · 07-25-2006, 10:27 PM

Is there any boot options or login options to get you straight to the command line, not X? If the installation is only 5 days old you may be able to reinstall without it being a huge problem...but it's always nicer to solve a problem.

binary_y2k2 · 07-25-2006, 11:33 PM

to login from a terminal you can either press "Ctrl-Alt-F1" when the X login screen comes up or you can boot in to the "recovery mode" from the grub menu. If you pressed "Ctrl-Alt-F1" you can login as your normal user and use "sudo -i" to get a root shell, if you want with the grub option then you'll be root from the get go.
You should make sure you have space in /tmp and /home/$USER

Code:

df -h

that's normally the reason that that error message comes up.