Last night I was working on my Sarge system, running a self-compiled version
of KDE 3.3, when suddenly I couldn't execute any commands or do anything at
all under my user login. I was able to switch to a console and log in as
root, where things worked normally. But I couldn't 'su' to my user login. I
even rebooted the system, but that didn't help.
<snip>
The symptoms are:
1) kdm still displays the login screen, but login fails after I try to log
in under my user account. There are messages in the log files about missing
permissions on /tmp, /home/david, etc. I checked /tmp's permissions, and
they are still read-write-execute for everybody.
3) While logged on as root in a console, when I do an 'su david', it gives
an error message "No shell" (I can't remember the exact wording), and fails
to log me on.
4) When I do an 'su - david', I get error messages about not being able to
cd to /home/david. Again the login fails. /home/david still exists, and has
owner 'david'.