Just now I was checkin’ my email in good ol’ Kmail when when system locks up. Not a freeze exactly, just that certain parts of the screen turned black and I couldn’t switch between applications any more. It looked like KDE crashed.
Problem is that now when I log in I just get a couple seconds of black screen and then it dumps me back to the login screen. So I’m writing this from the root account, which is still fine, but I’d like to be able to log in as myself again.
Thing is, there doesn’t seem to be anything at all that prompted this so I don’t know where to start to sort this out.
if it says “root root” instead of “[yourID] users” in front of the
file sizes you need to
chown [yourID]:users /home/[yourID]/.*authority
i think one of those might let you log in as yourself again…
if neither of those work, something deeper is broken…how old is your
hard drive (it may be very sick)…
I had the same problem this afternoon after having installed Texlive2009 on my OpenSUSE 11.2 32bit machine. I rebooted the machine and tried to log in but the screen stayed there unchanged both as a normal user and as root. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember my ID.
If its the same problem for you (/tmp or similar is full), then you can boot from the install CD or any bootable Linux CD/DVD, and carefully remove the relevant files.
Alternatively, boot up in runlevel 3 (enter ‘3’ at grub prompt). Log in as root, and do the same from there. You can also configure the files to be removed via ‘yast’ to get the text-mode version running. Navigate with arrow and <TAB> keys. (The advice given in the previous link still applies). When done, save changes and reboot with ‘shutdown -r now’ command.
shmuck wrote:
> That was it, /tmp was full. That’s crazy. Why would you put an
> expiration date on your OS like that?
expiration date??
what ARE you talking about? there is no expiration date, ever…there
is a date when patches are no longer supplied…like the last patch
for openSUSE 10.3 was in November of last year, but yet i send this
from an unexpired 10.3!!
you control the size of /tmp, if yours is too small that is not an
openSUSE fault…
please do not jump into another thread and say you have the same
problem…unless you have EXACTLY the same problem…which you do not,
the previous poster was working along normally and everything when
haywire…while yours occurred after an install and reboot…
> this afternoon after having installed
> Texlive2009 on my OpenSUSE 11.2 32bit machine. I rebooted the machine
WHY did you reboot? this is not Windows…automatically rebooting
after an install is a bad habit (unless you install a new kernel and
then a reboot IS required)
> and tried to log in but the screen stayed there unchanged both as a
> normal user and as root. Unfortunately I couldn’t remember my ID.
then, is your problem simply a matter of forgotten password?
is your user password and the root password the same?
this is easy, google: lost root password linux
along the way you will accidentally learn why you have zero security
if you do not maintain physical control of your machine…
What I meant was, if /tmp is never cleaned by default then this will happen to everyone eventually. No matter how big it is, it will fill up given enough time.
shmuck wrote:
> No matter how big it is, it will fill up given enough time.
well, as long as you have a healthy system, follow normal procedures
and do not load up with shaky, error or crash prone software it will
take a VERY long time to fill /tmp with junk…
that is, my experience is that the only things of any consequential
size which stays in /tmp are those things trapped when a running
process is killed or otherwise terminated (or crashes) in unfriendly
ways leaving orphaned temporary files…
and, of course one of the System Administrator’s duties is to monitor
system health, space available and etc…if lazy enough s/he can even
command the system to send an email (or SMS/text message maybe) when
the available space reaches any level the Admin specifies…so . . .
> DenverD;2186049 Wrote:
>> shmuck wrote:
>> > That was it, /tmp was full. That’s crazy. Why would you put an
>> > expiration date on your OS like that?
>>
>> expiration date??
>>
>> what ARE you talking about? there is no expiration date, ever…
>
> What I meant was, if /tmp is never cleaned by default then this will
> happen to everyone eventually. No matter how big it is, it will fill up
> given enough time.
Install tmpwatch, that should solve the issue for you.
It’s not the same problem that /tmp is too small or full. It might be another problem.
Fortunately I have other user account which I can use GUI to log in. I found that the /tmp was not too small. However followed your guide and the advice mentioned above in the link I cleaned the /tmp. After that I deinstalled Texlive2009 and did a reboot. Like Shmuck, I tried again to log in my account and the root account and I got a couple seconds of black screen and then it dumped back to the login screen again. Neither of them worked. As I remember after the installation I did some modifications of some configuration files and got some warning messages “D-Bus” and I just ignored them. The problem may lie in there. I have to figure it out and find other solutions.
suggest you start your own thread…describe your linux/openSUSE
experience, hardware, software version, desktop environment used, the
symptoms of the problem as you experience them, and what you did just
before the problem began…
all of that info together in the first post…then, create a
descriptive subject which gives drive by helpers the chance to WANT to
help you, maybe:
well, i was gonna try to help you write a subject but it was gonna
sound like:
forgot password, couldn’t log in as self/root but now can however
screen goes black
is that right? if so maybe your is: blank black screen during log in
Thank very much for your help! Following your tips I run the commands above and got some long out files. And I tried to understand the meaning of them. I have to say it’s hard for me to understand them.
As I mentioned before I have other user accounts which I can log in and work. I compared the both user accounts, one could be put password but stay by the login screen while another one can be logged in and go forward to work, and found out that the former one has “bash” as login shell and the later one has “tcsh” as login shell. It’s worth changing the login shell from “bash” to “csh” and it worked! I can log in my own account now which I couldn’t do yesterday. To verify whether my idea was correct I then changed the login shell of my account back to “bash” again and logged out and logged in to see what happened. Again the login screen stayed unchanged. After changing the login shell to “csh” I can log in my account and work like before. So I guess the problem might be from the login shell, except “bash” the other shells would work, but I can’t reason why.
Thanks for your kindness to help me to open a new thread. Basically I prefer to go over of the forum to look whether someone had the same or similar problems and may get some solutions. If I can not find something I would like to open my own thread. Phenomenologically shmuck has the same problem as I had: after doing some operations and logged out and couldn’t log in again. So I decided to stay by this thread and ask experts for help. And I do get some useful suggestions.
My problem seems to be solved when I changed the login shell of my account from “bash” to “csh” and I can now log in and work as before.
AFAIK, most of us have “bash” as the the login shell. You seem to have the default login shell set to “csh”.
Going forward if you need help with terminal command or scripts you’ll have to remind us you are using “csh” and not “bash” shell.
I set a user account to “tcsh” for running a specific program on purpose. I was lucky to find out the problem relative quickly when comparing the difference of the two shells. Last weekend I did a little research on login shells and found out I might have probably modified .profile and .bashrc in a wrong way somehow therefore all user accounts setting “bash” as the the login shell did not function, include root account. I should learn the lessons.
