Hi
Have a dual boot Windows-Ubuntu set up. Has been working fine for the past year.
Primarily work in Ubunt (Mate 18.04LTS) but recently was in the Windows partition for a couple days.
Anyways switched back tonight, formatted a new external SSD using Gparted and also created a mount point for it(not sure if this last step is my problem)
When I reboot I am presented with the Ubuntu 'logged out' screen instead of automatically booting into Ubuntu Mate.
And when I enter my pw, I am stuck in a loop. My screen goes black for a couple seconds then get the same pink logged out screen.
Attached is a list of my Boot Priority volumes in BIOS. Tried switching the 2 Ubuntu volumes but no difference. I can boot back into Windows no problem.
When you're at the login screen (what you call the "logged out screen"), what happens if you switch to a console (ctrl + alt + F1 or F2, F3...), log in text mode (you'll have to type your password blindly) and then run the command startx (that starts a X session with the default desktop)? Do you get to your MATE desktop or do you get errors?
Screen goes black for a couple seconds then get error 'Unable to connect to X Server, Connection refused.
Should I attempt a sudo startx instead?
Also tried suggestions here since this seems to be a common problem
So my permissions check out. Guessing its something to do with gdm?? Frustrating. Would love to know what causes this and how to prevent it from happening again!
I don't think you need to run startx as root (i.e. with sudo); it could even make the problem worse.
When you checked the permissions for .Xauthority, did you make sure that they were correct (rw-r--r--) and that the file belonged to you?
Also, the page you linked to doesn't say to check for .ICEauthority, which I think needs to have specific rights too. EDIT: and .dmrc too.
So, could you login in text again and post the output (a photo will do just fine) of the following commands?
ls -lA ~ | grep auth
ls -lA ~ | grep dmrc
Also, it's unlikely that GDM has anything to do with the issue. And with Ubuntu MATE, you should use LightDM rather than GDM (which is made for GNOME).
Thanks. Unless doing something wrong, nothing happens.
Attached is the result of ls -lA only
Also my partitions. Wondering if it might be a full partition issue as my root partition /dev/sda2 is 100% full.
But how to free up space?
Suspecting my trach bin needed emptying tried the following
sudo chown -R yourusername /root/.local/share/Trash/
and then
rm -rf ~/.local/share/Trash
but get errors saying system files can't remove.
First thing: you're on a root console. That's not good. Be sure to log on with your regular user account, as the goal is to check that permissions are right for your user name in your home folder, not root's one.
So, please give the output of the commands I gave from your home dir. It doesn't really matter that you're logged as root but be sure to check the files with ls in your user dir (replace ~ in my commands by /home/username in that case).
As for disk space, it could be problematic if you made a system partition that's too small, as you might be too short on space to install software. Maybe give the content of your fstab to check how your partitions and mount points are organized:
cat /etc/fstab
BTW, is there any reason why you've enabled and use the root account? By default, on Ubuntu, it's disabled and regular users can get root privileges by using sudo.
First of all thanks for your help in resolving this.
I am using root shell via Grub>advanced>recovery mode because when I go to regular cmd line using Ctrl+AltF3 my console gets spammed with unrelated PCIe bus errors making it difficult to see what I am typing(another issue)
Again did as suggested using my home directory but still returning nothing for both grep commands.
Ok attached is results of cat /etc/fstab
Another thing I tried was simply running startx from cmd but get xauth -unable to write authority file error.
IIRC, in recovery mode you're on a special session, not on your usual installation, and you may not have access to your home dir. Also, I think the system is mounted as read-only.
In the recovery mode, when you do ls /home do you see a directory with your user name?
EDIT: can you give me your username? In the worst case, I can give you commands to type blindly on your regular session despite the flow of PCIe errors you get. As long as you type them correctly, it should work.
Thanks
username jim
In recovery mode don't recall seeing anything under ls/home
Do you agree the problem is a full partition? If so just want to remove files or make partition larger via cmd line so I can get to my desktop.
Long term I need to figure out how to avoid this from happening again.
Not sure, as if the recovery mode is, as I remember, some kind of virtual disk with a minimal system, it might be normal that it's full. It would be better to check from the real system to be sure.
So, try to boot your usual session, log in a console and type the following commands despite the PCIe error messages you get (it should ask you for your password for the first one, not the ones after):
sudo chown jim:jim /home/jim/.dmrc /home/jim/.ICEauthority /home/jim/.Xauthority
sudo chmod 644 /home/jim/.dmrc /home/jim/.Xauthority
sudo chmod 600 /home/jim/.ICEauthority
After that, if you managed to type them with no errors, switch back to the login screen (should be on ctrl + alt + F7) and try to login.
Thanks
Still no luck
Have to assume its a full partition issue.
You can try with the command sudo fdisk -l which will list all the disks and partitions and see if the one used for the system is really full.
You can do this in recovery mode. Note that the output will be long, so you might want to display it page by page by piping it into more:
sudo fdisk -l | more
EDIT: my bad, fdisk doesn't show space taken on a disk. df would, but you'd have to be sure that the system on the recovery session is actually mounted from your disk.
