Black screen after login with cursor

I had trouble with my Leap 15.0 install, so I decided to do a reinstall after backing up my /home partition. The reinstall was successful. But after I copied the backup of the /home partition back to the machine, when I log in, I only get a blank screen and a cursor. If I log in as root, everything works fine. I also created a new test user and that desktop also shows fine. I noticed that the owner and group on all of the folders and files is shown as root:root instead of username:users. Could this be the problem? How can I fix this?

Darrell

Yes, that would be the problem. You apparently did backup in a way that does not preserve ownership of files.

As root:


cd /home/someuser
chown -R someuser:users .

Change “someuser” to the actual user name (loginid). And repeat for each user with this problem.

After doing that, I can see that the folders are now under my ownership. All accept the folders that begin with a “.”. When I log in I still cannot see anything on the desktop. Just a cursor and nothing else. But the user user accounts are fine.

Darrell

Ownership needs to be fixed on the folders that begin with “.”.

If you had exactly followed what I suggested, that should have happened due to the “-R” (recursive) option for “chown”.

That has not been my experience. I normally would do:

chmod -R /home/someuser

or else:

cd /home
chmod -R someuser