Second user desktop

[Guest]

Hello, I just upgraded from Kubuntu 12.10 to 13.04. The installation seemed to go fine, during which I used the existing /home partition. On 12.10, I had a user account set up for my wife. Once upgraded, I again added an account for her, and linked the account to the pre-existing /home folder she was using. Now, her account is visible on the login screen, but when the password is entered, the screen goes blank for a second and returns to the login screen. How do I get the account login to present a desktop.

I have had zero similiar issues with my own account.

Specs.

Kubuntu 13.04, KDE 4.11.1, no Windows partition
Intel Core 2 Duo,
single 7200 rpm HD with /boot, /, /opt, and /home partitions

Thanks in advance. For anything I may need to do in Konsole, please be very specific. I love linux, and am comfortable using the command line, but I know just enough to be really dangerous.

[claydoh]

You say you upgraded, but that would not have touched your user accounts or any data in your /home drive. Can we assume you did a fresh, clean install?

It could be that the account's user and group ID's might have been given different numerical values between installs. To check, open a terminal and type in the following command, substituting the full path a known file in your wife's home dir:

stat /home/lark/Downloads/grocery-list.ods

(you might have to do this using sudo)
Here is my output:

scary-terrier@scary-terrier-Crusty_Old_Laptop:~$ stat /home/scary-terrier/Downloads/grocery-list.ods
  File: ‘/home/scary-terrier/Downloads/grocery-list.ods’
  Size: 25959           Blocks: 64         IO Block: 4096   regular file
Device: 806h/2054d      Inode: 793443      Links: 1
Access: (0664/-rw-rw-r--)  [U][B]Uid[/B][/U]: ( [B][COLOR=#ff0000]1000[/COLOR][/B]/    lark)   [B][U]Gid[/U][/B]: ( [COLOR=#ff0000][B]1000[/B][/COLOR]/    lark)
Access: 2013-08-14 14:29:18.814140943 -0400
Modify: 2013-01-05 11:00:52.780074022 -0500
Change: 2013-08-10 16:57:34.391553265 -0400
 Birth: -

Note the numbers in red, these are my main user's uid (user ID) and gid (group ID) - which in Ubuntu is usually 1000. Go into the User Manager in System Settings and see if the uid and gid are the same as the output from the 'stat' command for your wife's account.

If they match, come back for further help.

If it is different, you will have to go and modify the user account's User ID (uid) match the terminal output. You will also need to edit the same thing for the Group that has the same name so that the Group ID (gid) matches. Once everything is saved and applied, you probably will need to reboot.

This is the semi-gui way to do it, so one can see easily with some context as to what is being done. There is a full terminal way to do this, but i can't recall, and am too lazy to read the fine man-pages

Now, there is another way to fix this in that instead of fixing the uid/gid to match existing files, it goes the other way: it changes the ownership of the files to that of the new user account. It may actually be simpler, but is command-line but actually quite clear:

sudo chown -R <wifes-username>:<wifes-username> /home/<wifes-username>

chown = CHange OWnership
-R = recursive (all files and directories inside the path)
<user name>:<group name>
<wifes-username> = the full path to what needs to be changed

It might take a few minutes or longer if there are a huge number of files to chown, if you want to see the output in the terminal, change the "-R" to a "-Rv", the 'v' means 'make it verbose'.

[Guest]

Thank you, that was the problem. I did have to change her UID, and it seems to work fine now.

Thanks again

Kenric