Re: new installation : cannot login
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andy wrote:
> Hi all
>
> I have just installed Deb Etch onto my wife's computer, preserving her
> pre-existing /home directory.
>
> The installation was flawless until I went to go and login as her and am
> being denied access at the gdm login screen. The messages refer to the
> $HOME/.dmrc saying that it will be ignored, and that the $HOME directory
> must be owned by the user and have 644 permissions and not writable by
> other users. Click OK and then I get a dialog box informing me that my
> session lasted less than 10 seconds. When I look at the
> ~/.xsession-errors file I am informed that it cannot create the per-user
> gnome configuration directory .gnome2_private: permission denied.
>
> In a word: help!
> Did I do something wrong or did I skip out a step? When I installed my
> Debian system I didn't try and preserve a pre-existing /home directory.
> I am scared of fiddling just in case I toast her data (in which case,
> I'll be toast!!).
>
> Any ideas please?
>
> Cheers
>
> /A
>
>
Andy, don't despair. the data is still there.
Most likely it is either a userid problem or a permissions problem.
Log in from a tty (alt-F1 for example) as root.
Depending on which distro you ran before, it could be a userid problem.
Debian users begin at userid 1000 but not all do. Mandriva for example
begins with 500. If you're root and do a ls -la /home you should see
the owners, if it's a number and not a name, that's your clue. In that
case you need to change the owner of her /home directory to her with the
chown command. If the permissions are wrong, you can change them with
the chmod command.
Good luck.
Joe
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