After some weird GUI freeze-up the other day, which required power-cycling to reboot, Karmic Gnome now gets stuck after switching to GUI mode with the small spinning wheel, right before the XFCE log-in screen is supposed to appear.
Back then a few years past:
Due to Gnome power management issues, I added XFCE back in the day to use its version, but came to miss too many Desktop features compared to Gnome to stay with the XFCE desktop. So after a little while, I switched back to the Gnome Desktop, yet kept the XFCE power and also the network manager, since they often worked more reliable than Gnome's.
But in the process, I got stuck with XFCE's blue mouse log-in screen and the Gnome session manager not working anymore.
Now and here again:
Log-in as root in a console works as usual.
Log-in from a console as the regular user works now only partially (see attached screenshot).
LM08_GroupPerm_2015-02-13_23-40-34.jpg
Apparently the user's group permissions for root owned executables and directories are not being issued, so nothing that is owned by root (like i.e. /usr/bin/env, cal, lsusb or bc) can be accessed or executed. However, 'echo $PATH' shows that path is set correctly and works for the user's own files and executables.
Since I don't know about the inner workings of the log-in and start-up process, there might now a needed config file now be missing or corrupted somewhere.
Sifting through dmesg and the most recent log files in /var/log/ I didn't come across anything that jumped right at me, but then again, I don't really know what exactly I would have to be looking for, if there actually would be any record of my current problem being recorded.
- How can I start the Gnome desktop from there and work as the now defunct user?
- How do I check for the regular user's group involvements and what should they be?
- Is it possible, to fix or recreate the current user account log-in data without damaging/deleting its existing files and settings, to see, if that would fix things?
- If not, what do I have to look into, to find out why the user account doesn't get those elevated group privileges for root owned files any longer?
Please be detailed and provide step by step instructions for where to go and what to do.
Thanks in advance
Attached Images
LM08_GroupPerm_2015-02-13_23-40-34.jpg
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