[EdLUG] Unable to login to my kubuntu 20.04 desktop

[Thomas Kluyver]

You may be able to get it starting normally again by creating a home folder (/home/<username>) and ensuring it belongs to the relevant user (i.e. use chown if it gets created as root). The problems it's having are likely because things try to write to $HOME and don't have permission to do so when that's / instead of a normal home directory.

As other people have said, you'll need to get your files back from backups. If you don't have backups, there are recovery tools that may be able to recover some deleted files from 'empty' disk space, but you don't want to rely on that unless there's no other option.

Thomas

On Wed, 7 Apr 2021, at 19:54, Alistair wrote:
> I have managed to foul up my Thinkpad running kubuntu 20.04, and cannot login to the desktop.

> I can login to the TTY2 console, where 'HOME=/'. The /home folder contains only '.' and '..'.

> I was trying to delete some folders and files from an external hdd. These had previously been created using the 'rsync' command on this m/c and account.

> Deleting failed using the GUI so I tried to recursively remove the from the command line as the normal user, then using sudo.

> At this point I started getting messages about system crash, kmail started complaining that it could not write to mailboxes. There were other messages so I shut the box down, during which it reported that it could not write to the drive.

> It booted up to the GUI login screen, but refused login to my account.

> I switched to the TTY2 console and logged in there:

> It reports "no directory, logging in with HOME=/"

>  

> The 'ls -a /home' command results in "'.' and '..'" only.

>  

> It refuses to start the gui (startx) timing out with:

> "xauth: timeout in locking authority file //.Xauthority

> xaut: timeout in locking authority file //.Xauthority

> (EE)

> Fatal server error

> (EE) Cannot open log file "//.local/share/xorg/xorg.1.log

> (EE)

> (EE)

> Please consult the X.Org Foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help

> (EE)

> xinit: giving up

> Xinit: unable to connect to X server: connection refused

> xinit: server error

> xauth: timeout in locking authority file //.Xauthority"

>  

> How do I recover the system?

>  

> Regards,

> Alistair

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