On a fresh install of 12.1 I’m having the issue described in the title. I’m unable to login using any of the dm/wm’s provided when using my normal user. When logging in as root (yes, terrible idea, etc.) it works perfectly fine. When logging in as my normal user, once I enter my credentials, the login manager briefly exits and then restarts, taking me back to the login prompt. The only errors logged during a failed (normal user) login are in Xorg.0.log:
4658.857] (EE) Failed to load module "fglrx" (module does not exist, 0)
4658.879] (EE) FATAL: RadeonHD presently does not work with kernel modesetting (KMS).
As you can see, there are two (EE) lines: one complaining about not finding fglrx, and another complaining about radeon not supporting kms. I don’t suspect that either of these are actually related, since logging in as root works fine. But these are the only logs I got
Another thing which might be important is that I’m using a separate /home partition. I’m a pretty experienced linux user, and I’ve successfully setup Arch, Ubuntu and Fedora to use this partition happily. I’ve double checked that the UID is the same across all systems (1000) and the permissions are set properly (700). Any help would be greatly appreciated.
So for one of your error messages, I would try using the kernel load option called: nomodeset
You would enter this just before you press the enter key after selecting the openSUSE start you want with your keyboard. This option already exists in the failsafe startup and can be made permanent by editing the /boot/grub/menu.lst file as root after startup.
As to your user setup, I guess I could not recommended sharing the /home area between different distributions. One could log in as root to say openSUSE/KDE, create a new user in YaST, log out and then log back into the new user and see if that works. If it does, then the user setup is messed up in some way to do with permissions and would not be a problem for root as he can do anything.
> Another thing which might be important is that I’m using a separate
> /home partition. I’m a pretty experienced linux user, and I’ve
> successfully setup Arch, Ubuntu and Fedora to use this partition
> happily. I’ve double checked that the UID is the same across all systems
> (1000) and the permissions are set properly (700). Any help would be
> greatly appreciated.
Did you look in /var/log/messages?
Try to login in text mode as those users.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
Gave this a shot, no dice. I don’t think the Xorg messages are the cause of these problems, after trying a few things.
A shared /home partition is reasonably common among distro hoppers such as myself. That way config files and documents are available and identical no matter what distro I’m using (useful for Unix Admin class, especially). At any rate, I tried this (creating a test user with a system-created /home) and it worked happily. The directory was created on my /home partition by the system, so apparently it’s specifically my user’s folder which is messed up. The next thing I’m going to try mirroring the perms on the test user’s directory and see if that helps. Thanks for the idea; I’ll report back soon.
chmod’ing the permissions of my home folder to 755 (mirroring the permissions of the system-created user’s folder) did not resolve the problem, unfortunately.
I forgot to mention that logging in via a tty works fine for all users.
And /var/log/messages does give some output that I overlooked:
On 2012-04-07 16:46, hailtothethief wrote:
> A shared /home partition is reasonably common among distro hoppers such
> as myself. That way config files and documents are available and
> identical no matter what distro I’m using (useful for Unix Admin class,
> especially). At any rate, I tried this (creating a test user with a
> system-created /home) and it worked happily. The directory was created
> on my /home partition by the system, so apparently it’s specifically my
> user’s folder which is messed up. The next thing I’m going to try
> mirroring the perms on the test user’s directory and see if that helps.
> Thanks for the idea; I’ll report back soon.
>
You can not share home folders across different Linux installs, you see
what happens. You have to use separate users with some shared folders, for
data, not configs.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
Actually Carlos, I am not sure you understood what he is saying. I have done the same thing he has. You keep /home on its own partition with /home/username on that partition. This way when you install another distro, or a fresh install, you have all your settings ready. At least thats how I read what he’s saying.
I do think this is a case of a corrupted desktop upon where one Linux distribution has messed up another and most often the cause is different versions of the same desktop. While I can share a GNOME or KDE setup, mostly within openSUSE, its not really recommended between distributions. Even within openSUSE, a desktop upgrade can send your settings into a mess that prevent that desktop from loading. Even running Gnome and KDE in openSUSE with the same user can mess up things between the two. So, I don’t recommended you share /home between distributions unless you keep different users for each desktop. My normal solution is to keep common EXT4 and NTFS partitions, one for all things Linux and the other for all things multimedia or meant to be shared with Windows and keep those /home partitions separate between distributions. Of course, if you just use VirtualBox, it keeps them all separate anyway with your main one more or less safe from corruption.
On 2012-04-08 01:16, Jonathan R wrote:
> Actually Carlos, I am not sure you understood what he is saying. I have
> done the same thing he has. You keep /home on its own partition with
> /home/username on that partition. This way when you install another
> distro, or a fresh install, you have all your settings ready. At least
> thats how I read what he’s saying.
Yes, and that’s what I say you should not use: you must not share the user
configs across different distros - not even across different versions of
the same distro.
–
Cheers / Saludos,
Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)
Sharing user configs (home directory), certainly not! Sharing /home partition, anytime, when you know what you are doing. It suffices to modify the home base directory on each distro or release. It is done with useradd -D on all distros and useradd --save-defaults/–show-defaults on openSUSE.
Then you give your users the same UID so that they can share data, but not configs. When you know about every detail of every application, you know which config you can share and it can indeed make sense for certain applications and save you time. But sharing ~/.config and ~/.kde(4) … never ever!
Which login manager? Xorg.0.log is not revelant, since the X server has already started. But what’s in the ~/.xsession-errors of the users who can not log in.
Which permissions do you have in mind?
Did you create a dummy user and try to log in as this user?
