Can't login to Kubuntu suddenly

[Drenhead]

I have had Kubuntu installed for a few months with no problems, but now all of a sudden, it won't let me log in. I haven't installed anything or change any files that I know of that would keep it from being able to log in.

The Kubuntu login screen comes up with my userid already populated. When I type in my password, it goes to a blank screen, then after a few seconds, it goes back to the login screen.

Does anyone have any suggestions on how to login to my system?

Thanks in advance.

[Princey]

Re: Can't login to Kubuntu suddenly

What graphics card do you have? It seems like X has messed up. Try this. Press

CTRL + ALT + F1

together. That will throw you into a prompt. Type in your username, press enter, then your password, press enter when done. Then type in the following:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and hit the enter key. Most of the defaults are fine. Be sure to chose the write card. When you're done, type in

startx

and you should be able to get a GUI and up and running.

[ethersoft]

Re: Can't login to Kubuntu suddenly

I'm having the same difficulty - the kdm screen comes up fine, but I can't login, not even in failsafe mode. After I enter my password, the screen goes blank for a second or 2 and then the kdm screen returns.

I can login to the text consoles fine, so I followed the advice posted earlier in this thread and ran

dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

That did not help. FWIW, I have an nvidia graphics card.

Thanks in advance for any help.

[ethersoft]

Re: Can't login to Kubuntu suddenly

Here's a further data point. In /var/log/syslog, I see these messages:

kdm_greet[4984]: Can't open default user face
kdm_greet[4984]: Internal error: memory corruption detected

Does anyone know what I should do to correct this?

BTW, selecting failsafe mode from kdm has no effect.

Thank you in advance for any help.

[penguin.ch]

Re: Can't login to Kubuntu suddenly

You may want to check the current status of your partition(s):

df -x tmpfs

(man df)

[ethersoft]

Re: Can't login to Kubuntu suddenly

Dear UnicornRider,

You may want to check the current status of your partition(s):

df -x tmpfs

(man df)

That was not the problem, but thank you for your help.

The ultimate problem I had was that I installed coreutils-6.8, which had changed the behavior of expr, as demonstrated below:

$ /usr/bin/expr "20x11-common_process-args" : '[[:alnum:]_-]\+$'
25
$ /opt/bin/expr-broken !*
/opt/bin/expr-broken "20x11-common_process-args" : '[[:alnum:]_-]\+$'
/opt/bin/expr-broken: Unmatched [ or [^

That particular expr command came from /etc/X11/Xsession. Since the /etc/X11/Xsession script is run with 'set -e', the error executing expr in the execution of /etc/X11/Xsession caused the xsession to abort and for kdm to restart.

Regards.