I have been trying to get rid of stupid Microsoft, and I put Ubuntu 9.10 on all of my computers. I have been running, and figuring everything out just fine. I have a decent amount of knowledge in this field, but now im stuck. On my Optiplex Gx620 Ubuntu loads, then automatic login kicks in then it proceeds, finally it just kicks right back to the main log in field. I went in recovery mode, and did nearly everything, but no results. This happened before, and I went into recovery mode, and freed space, and so forth. I cant log in x-term gnome or xfce. I can log in fail safe gnome but it is just a blank background. Only thing I can log into is recovery mode command prompt.
It is set up as a dual boot system with xp pro on the other. Its a Dell Optiplex Gx620 with P4 3ghz, 64 bit capable, hyper threading, speed step, etc, and 1.5 gb interleaved memory setup. I am really annoyed at this situation. Anything to fix this issue??

If you open a second terminal ( eg. <ctrl>+<alt>-<F2> ) and log in as root, can you see any errors in /var/log/messages ?

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I had this problem too when I upgraded from 9.04 to 9.10. Everything worked fine until I ran the first updates. Since then I've been unable to log in. Thinking it was an Ubuntu problem, I did a bit of distro hopping (Lenny and CentOS too old - couldn't get wireless working, Pardus froze during the installation process, Fedora 12 wouldn't recognise my wireless card) until I found Linux Mint 'Helena' to be everything that Ubuntu was plus a little more. It also worked fine until I ran the first updates, and now the problem is repeated there. This could be a problem with Ubuntu-derivatives. Research to date would indicate that on some machines this is a kernel 2.6.31 problem, which goes away when 2.6.32 is installed. This is a little beyond my level of competence, so I'll wait until it becomes available through the repositories. In the meantime I'm going back to 9.04.

I had an issue at work recently that prevented anyone logging in at the console - someone had modified /etc/pam.d/login to use:

..as per Oracle OAS installation notes, not realising they were on a 64bit OS.

It was still possible to log in via ssh and the fix was just to modify it to:

cheers

Thanks - that might work for Psycho666, but it won't help with my problem. The machine with Ubuntu/Mint is a 32 bit. I forgot to mention that I have access to the messages through Gnome failsafe, (as per your message above) but I can't see anything detailing what is going wrong.