Score:0

Unable to log in after 20.04 upgrade

br flag

I upgraded from 18.04 to 20.04 on my Linux-only Thinkpad (after a great deal of hassle on account UEFI, and finally using boot-repair to update grub). The laptop now boots without a problem, but I'm still unable to get in.

The login screen shows my name, and when I enter my password, the screen blanks for a second and comes back to the same login screen with my name.

I am able to use my password to log in on the virtual console (Ctrl-Alt-F2) and I can see my /home and /opt directories as they were before the upgrade.

Any inputs on how to solve this would be appreciated.

Thanks in advance

s1b

guiverc avatar
cn flag
Login via text terminal and check you have sufficient disk space available to ensure a login can proceed (space in $HOME is where it matters; ie. your user directory; text logins don't require any space to be available as don't use work files, but GUI logins do).
br flag
Thanks for the response. /home has 20% free space and others too have plenty of space (/ - 96%, /opt - 37% and /boot 83%).
guiverc avatar
cn flag
% free doesn't say much without knowing the amount of space you allocated.. Assuming you're talking Ubuntu Desktop, the recommended minimum for / is 25GB, but I cannot know if you allocated that much, or more than that etc... If 20% free is a few hundred MB+ then you should be good...
br flag
Thanks. The 20% free is about 27 GB, so space does not appear to be the issue.
Score:1
br flag

After checking some more, I found that the upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04 (without formatting /home and /opt directories) had actually clobbered all permissions in the home directory. In particular, the .local directory was not writeable, which is probably why the login was hanging.

I've chowned the files to my username, and now the login is working. Since I used a recursive chown from the /home directory, I'm not sure if there would be any side effects, but at least login works.

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