A friend of mine was running Kubuntu (13.10, I think) and was offered the chance to upgrade to 14.04 today so she went ahead. After what seemed like a successful upgrade, she rebooted to find that the login screen only offered a Guest login. She phoned me to tell me about it and I did some research and came across a blog post with the same title as this thread by a helpful Mac user called Joost.
Over the phone, I talked her through the fix, she rebooted, and now has her login back. She's taking a very close look at things to see if anything else might have gone wrong.
I'm posting this here in case someone else has the same problem.
[Here's the technical bit.]
The problem was caused by her UID. Some years ago, when I first installed Linux on her PC and laptop, she wanted to sync certain directories on her PC with the same directories on her laptop. So when I installed Linux, I made sure her UID was the same on both machines. And this value was 501. And she's kept UID 501 all through these years. Then someone decided that the /etc/login.defs file in Kubuntu 14.04 should contain this:
UID_MIN 1000
This means that anyone with a UID lower than 1000 won't be allowed to log in. So all she had to do was change the 1000 to 500, save the file and reboot.
I don't know when this changed, and no one will have this problem if they've gone with Ubuntu's default values since their first installation. But there could be a few of us, so I hope this helps someone.
Over the phone, I talked her through the fix, she rebooted, and now has her login back. She's taking a very close look at things to see if anything else might have gone wrong.
I'm posting this here in case someone else has the same problem.
[Here's the technical bit.]
The problem was caused by her UID. Some years ago, when I first installed Linux on her PC and laptop, she wanted to sync certain directories on her PC with the same directories on her laptop. So when I installed Linux, I made sure her UID was the same on both machines. And this value was 501. And she's kept UID 501 all through these years. Then someone decided that the /etc/login.defs file in Kubuntu 14.04 should contain this:
UID_MIN 1000
This means that anyone with a UID lower than 1000 won't be allowed to log in. So all she had to do was change the 1000 to 500, save the file and reboot.
I don't know when this changed, and no one will have this problem if they've gone with Ubuntu's default values since their first installation. But there could be a few of us, so I hope this helps someone.
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