suddenly can't login

English Install/Boot/Login
1

Hi folks,

been using 11.2 with KDE on a Sony laptop since 11.2 was released
always ran perfect
suddenly I can’t login, I get to the login screen
type in password
it begins to load my desktop, then fails and dumps me back to the login screen
I can login as root, all my stuff is there (under /home/me)
I tried changing my password, no luck
I went to run level 3 and there I can login just fine
seems to be something with my KDE profile
any ideas where I might find some error messages telling me what’s going on?

this seemed to happen when I was running “blender” and making the machine do some heavy number crunching, it actually locked up:P

Ideas?
Dave

2

figured it out :wink:
blender wrote so much stuff into /tmp that the root partition ran out of space
just deleting everything in /tmp fixed me up

Dave

3

Thanks for sharing the fix, It’s always nice to see.

4

To let your* /tmp* behave use YaST > System > /etc/sysconfig editor.
Then open +System +Cron. Set CLEAR_TMP_DIRS_AT_BOOTUP and/or use a combination of the other parameters about TMP.

5

hcvv

thanks for the tip
there’s some very useful stuff there

Dave

6

Here is a tip. Never ever log into a GUI as root. You can damage the user files (change permission) by just browsing a user directory.

7

gogalthorp,

ok, I’ll bite :slight_smile:
how would you change file permissions just by looking in a directory as root from a GUI?
as a general rule, anything I have to do as root is done from the cli but I’m justing curious about what you mean
always trying to learn

Dave

8

There are control files that live on your home if a root process opens them it can change the ownership. If root owns them the the user can not use them and suddenly they can not use them and generally can not log on. .Xauthority is an example.

There is nothing you can do in a root GUI that you can not do as becoming root in a console/terminal except accidentally messing things up. :wink: