Refracta Development, Scripts, etc.
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golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 2:22 pm

My refracta wheezy has been rock solid for well over a year. Was working just fine yesterday when I popped in the "unofficial" devuan alpha2 iso. Rebooted to the live disk and installed on sdb. It's working (more or less).
Rebooted from the alpha2 back to wheezy and ran update-grub. Went back to alpha2. Then back to wheezy and lightdm is looping and won't let me in to xfce DE. Here's what I have tried:
Deleted .Xauthority and .ICEauthority in /home.
Uninstalled and reinstalled lightdm
Installed the latest kernel and X11 updates
Stopped lightdm etc/init.d/lightdm stop as per nadir's suggestion. startx still won't work from tty
Error message is:

Code:
  `Xauth: time out in locking authority file //.xauthority
  xinit: server error`

Very frustrating. Can this be fixed or do I need to reinstall from the refractasnapshot I made in September?
fsmithred

- fsmithred
- Posts: 2101
- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 2:42 pm

Like most things, it can probably be fixed, but I don't know what's wrong.
Did you try 'startx' while lightdm was not installed? If you did, and that didn't work, then the problem is not lightdm.
Did you just plain remove lightdm, or did you purge it? Purging should also get rid of the config files, and you can check it with 'aptitude search ~c' after purging. Then 'aptitude purge ~c' to get rid of all leftover config files.
ctrl-alt-f1 to get to console.
login as root
service stop lightdm
service start lightdm
ctrl-alt-f1 again, to see if there are any error messages in the console.
and/or...
ctrl-alt-f1
login as user, then su to root.
service stop lightdm
exit
startx
ctrl-alt-F7,8,9... until you find your desktop.
Another thing to try would be to make a new user, and see if they can log in with lightdm or use startx without lightdm. That'll rule out a problem with your user configs.
'adduser xunilog' (and then it will tell you what it wants.)
I'm gonna reboot my recently updated wheezy to make sure I don't have the problem. Been seeing a lot of weird things happening on multiple computers lately.
golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 3:37 pm

I tried logging in with another user. Same looping problem.
I searched for "timeout in locking authority file" and it looks like a permissions problem. This can happen when /home is not writable by the user.
I did mount my wheezy /home partition from alpha2 and it required root pw. I deleted the .Xauthority files from there. Could that have changed permissions on my home directory?
I'm not good with permissions. Gonna have to do some searching to figure out how to do that in a tty. Or maybe you have some suggetions
I also did an apt-get --purge remove lightdm and x still wouldn't start. Throws up the above error. As you said, that points to something other than lightdm.
I have a feeling if I can straighten out the permissions on /home, all will return to normal.
Last edited by golinux on Mon Oct 26, 2015 4:49 pm, edited 2 times in total.
golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 4:47 pm

Back on alpha2 now. Mounted my wheezy /home from devuan and owner has changed to devuan user and group.
Test mounted an old hardy /home partition on my other machine and owner/group remain as it should be.
I'm going to add the wheezy partitions to devuan fstab and see if that sets things right
If that fails, I'm gonna take this over to #devuan.
golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 5:34 pm

It just got worse. Now the alpha2 has the xauthority problem.
Think it's time to pull out the wheezy snapshot and reformat the alpha2 disk.
dzz

- dzz
- Posts: 647
- Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2011 11:53 am
- Location: Devon, England

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 6:51 pm

Might not be your issue but I had trouble before with sharing /home/ .. I always keep a separate "data" partition these days, rather than keeping user data mixed up with UI configs.
Are you sharing a /home/ between systems? Also.. check output of df -h, make sure nothing got filled up.
golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 6:56 pm

No, not sharing /home. Plenty of disk space. Just nuked the alpha2 on sdb and wheezy is still broken on sda. I'm in way over my head. Looks like a reinstall from a September refractasnapshot of wheezy
.
dzz

- dzz
- Posts: 647
- Joined: Wed Apr 27, 2011 11:53 am
- Location: Devon, England

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 7:46 pm

Try in a root tty (unless you intentionally keep some root-owned stuff in ~ ):

Code:
  `chown -R your_username:your_username /home/your_username`

Absolutely everything in ~ will then be owned by your_username.
golinux

- golinux
- Posts: 663
- Joined: Thu Nov 08, 2012 1:23 am

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 8:24 pm

I ran that command substituting my UN and it spit back this:

Code:
  `chown: can't access '/home/username': no such file or directory`

Even though I just mounted that partition from the live disk!!
fsmithred

- fsmithred
- Posts: 2101
- Joined: Wed Mar 09, 2011 9:13 pm

## Re: Wheezy lightdm login loop

Mon Oct 26, 2015 9:03 pm

Code:
  `chown -R golinux:golinux /mountpoint/golinux`

Or whatever the path really is when you mounted it from the live system.
BTW, the ownership appeared to change between debian and devuan because ownerships are really stored as the uid and gid, not the names. So anything owned by the primary user (1000:1000) will appear to be owned by the primary user on any system it gets mounted to.
This should work fine between debian and devuan, but it gets really wonky if you mix with some other distros. (e.g. fedora/redhat use 500 for the first user.) I've also seen different group numbers on the same system groups between wheezy and jessie. That can cause sharing problem in some cases, especially if you're depending on being a member of a particular group to access a service or a file. Might be worth checking the group numbers. Look at etc/group and also compare 'id username' on both systems.
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