password fails even whenI reset it

[jdtiede]

I have been running Kubuntu 8.10 for a couple of months and this problem just came up yesterday. At the login screen, if I enter my password and click OK, the screen goes black for a second then comes back with no password showing and no move toward logging in. If I enter a wrong password, it will immediately tell me "Invalid password" without going black first. I tried changing my password using they mode screen, clicking edit. No change. I tried this with old and now passwords; same result. I couldn't make the method of editing the grub file work.

I am about to the point of reloading, but I have put a lot on the HD, including setting up Lazarus. Thin is the first version that has let me set that up without dependencies I couldn't solve, so I am reluctant to go to another version.

[Snowhog]

Re: password fails even whenI reset it

Boot into recovery (single user) mode from the Grub menu. You'll be at the CLI, and operating as root. Type:

df -hTxtmpfs

You'll get a listing similar to this:

Filesystem  Type  Size Used Avail Use% Mounted on
/dev/sda1   ext3  8.0G 3.1G 4.5G 41% /
/dev/sda5   ext3   20G 6.8G  13G 36% /home
/dev/sda2   ext3  7.9G 3.2G 4.3G 43% /media/sda2
/dev/sda6   ext3   20G 7.7G  11G 42% /media/sda6
/dev/sda3   ext3  7.9G 3.1G 4.4G 42% /media/sda3
/dev/sda7   ext3   20G 2.1G  17G 11% /media/sda7
/dev/sdd1   ext3   28G 1.2G  25G  5% /media/USB_30G
/dev/sdc1   vfat   56G 6.8G  50G 12% /media/USB_60G
/dev/sdb1   vfat  4.7G 8.0K 4.7G  1% /media/PCMCIA_5G

Check the values for Used Avail on the root partition (specifically) and your /home partition. If your root partition is at 100% (Use%) then you have a space issue that is preventing you from completing a desktop login.

[jdtiede]

Re: password fails even whenI reset it

Looked at the disk space; that is not the cause of the problem.

[toad]

Re: password fails even whenI reset it

Can you log into a shell?

[JohanLingen]

Re: password fails even whenI reset it

If it is not a space problem, it might be a video problem. Have you recently updated drivers or replaced your video card?

Also, you might want to check whether you have "KDE session" selected, and not "failsafe session" (to select, press the button in the middle and at the bottom of the login screen)

[dibl]

Re: password fails even whenI reset it

One easy thing that sometimes fixes* it is to go into your /home/user directory and rename the hidden directory .kde to something like .kde_bak, then reboot.

*You get a clean default KDE desktop, but your previous custom settings are lost. Actually they're not lost -- they're still in the backed up .kde folder.