GUI Login Broken - Stuck in a Loop

[otisklt]

I have recently installed a 2nd video card which enables me to use crossfire.
I had the AMD proprietary drivers in use beforehand.

First boot after putting card in, I got black screen with no GUI to login, tty1 text only.
I have since worked on it some to try and fix it by unloading and reloading the AMD drivers which seemed to help some.
Based on some forum searching I tried a reinstall of the kubuntu-desktop package but that seems to have had no effect.

Now I get to the GUI login screen but upon logging in, with any window manager selected, the screen blanks for a moment as it seems to switch to a window manger but then brings back up the login dialogue.

I don't think my issue is driver related at this point since:
1) it does not matter which window manager is picked
2) if I login on tty1 and startx I get an openbox session and can run KDE apps.

Any suggestions on what to look at next?

[vinnywright]

check to see if your .Xauthority has been hijacked by root ,,,,,run this and see if you still own it

ls -la ~/ | grep X

it should come back like this

vinny@vinny-Inspiron-560:~$ ls -la ~/ | grep X                                                                                                   
-rw-------  1 vinny vinny    63 Apr  9 16:59 .Xauthority

with your user name instead of vinny vinny ,,,, if it seas root root then do a

sudo rm -rf ~/.Xauthority

and try to log in again

VINNY

[oshunluvr]

If that doesn't work, look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log. Could be that X is crashing at log in.

[otisklt]

Ok thanks a bunch for the suggestions, I will give it a go and post back.

[otisklt]

Well that .Xauthority file was set to root for the owner and removing it got me a different result but not logged in yet...

Now I get 2 informational messages and then dropped back to the login prompt:

Configuration file "/home/user/.kde/share/config/knotifyrc" not writeable.
and same for "/home/user/.kde/share/config/ksmserverc"

An ls -la check showed all the files in that config folder are owned by root.
So I reclaimed all the .kde contents in the same manner and then was able to get logged in.

Cheers Vinny thanks for that tip.

[Snowhog]

Do your self a favor and make sure that ALL your files/folders in your /home directory are owned by you.

Open a console. Assuming your username is otiskit, type:

sudo chown -R otiskit:otiskit /home/otiskit

and press Enter.

This will change ownership on all files/folders in your /home directory to yourself, which they all should be.

[kubicle]

chown -R otiskit:otiskit /home/otiskit

You need to "sudo" that for it to work (unless logged in as root, of course)

Example (this is more generic and will work with any username, primary group and home location, when you're logged in as that user):

sudo chown -R $(id -u):$(id -g) $HOME

@otiskit:
Can you think of anything you might have done to make root own your $HOME, would be nice to know for future reference. For example, running startx with sudo (yes, generally a bad idea) can cause your $HOME to get "disowned". Similarly, running GUI apps with sudo (instead of kdesudo) can cause the same, but usually in a more limited fashion.

[otisklt]

I did go back and address all the files in the home directory before you all mentioned it.

I did fall victim to my own issue as far as the ownership thing... I did run sudo startx from tty1 because it stated it would not without sudo. I did this while trying to figure out if I was having a video issue or not.