I ordered a pre-configured Linux laptop with Ubuntu-Mate to which I cannot log-in at the moment. I would really appreciate your help to solve this.
The harddisk is encrypted, but I can open this, so no problem.
When the laptop was prepared they asked me for a user name for which I just gave "user". After receiving the laptop I changed "user" to lets call it "new user" in the Mate GUI (I guess this is the root of the problem) and of course I also changed "password" to "new password"
The home directory was not renamed after this
At the start screen of Mate after booting, where you have to put the password to login I do not have the choice to change the user name. So per default I have to use the combination "new user" + "new password"
When doing this I get the message "Failed to start session"
When go to the command window by hitting strg+alt+F1 I am asked for the login and password it tells me log-in incorrect for the combination "new user" + "new password" but the combination "user" + "new password" works
Anybody has an idea how to solve this so I can access my laptop again?
Hi
I would create a brand new user that you will name as you want, a new password for that user and also, add all the same groups as the original user to the new one.
Or, to keep your user id :
Create a new temporary user with full privileges (will become id 1001)
Remove your actual user that has id 1000
Create new user that will take id 1000
Remove the temporary id 1001 user
This will leave you access to hour original home directory, but you will probably want to rename it.
thanks a lot for this quick reply! As I am quite a noob concerning Linux, would you mind to write down the commands how to do this? I would really appreciate that.
Go to Users and Groups and just fallow the GUI menu.
I'm advising you to do a reboot after adding the new user and adding it to those groups, and try to login with this new user and see if everything is working like (sudo framework, installing packages, ...), before deleting the original one.
Do not hesitate to ask for help sending some screenshots if you need.
You know that for me, the best is to reinstall all from scratch again and have a 100% trustful OS configuration. But it's only my point of view (I'm a security nerd xD)
Ahhh I see, i was thinking you can access the desktop.
So from the command line, can you check the user id number for your user ?
Also, check what is inside this file ?
cat /etc/lightdm/users.conf
Also make a sudo -s input your password, get at this location : /var/lib/AccountsService/users/
and read the file inside this dir to insure that your user is not a system account.
Hahaha good sopping
As we don't exactly know what is the issue, I can advise you to add a new user : adduser tempuser (fallow the process of this command)
Next add this user to those groups adm sudo :
usermod -aG sudo tempuser
usermod -aG adm tempuser
Reboot and try to connect with this user to fix the other user issues
YW i'm doing my best but it's not easy without "touching" the machine xD
