From Bugzilla Helper: User-Agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:0.9.3+) Gecko/20010825 Description of problem: I try to login using the default GUI (Gnome?) login screen, but the home directory listed in /etc/passwd has the wrong owner. In that case things get rather confused. A window pops up with no error message and just a continue button. Nothing else shows on the screen. Version-Release number of selected component (if applicable): How reproducible: Always Steps to Reproduce: 1.chown your home directory to someone else 2.login using the gui screen 3. Actual Results: A window pops up with no error message and just a continue button. Nothing else shows on the screen. Hitting the continue button gets me back to the original screen with no indication what is wrong. Expected Results: Some more informative error message. Should login with cd as /. Even better would be a dialog about how to fix it, but that is probably overkill. Additional info: This is obviously not a showstopper or a problem many people will run into. Most who do, will figure out how to deal with it. Still, it's the kind of problem that can happen whe someone installs a new disk containing a /home partition that may have wrong uids, or they have done an install after wiping out the root partition (this is what I did), in which case the new uids in /etc/passwd may not match what is on the disk.
reassigning to gdm
Hm. chown'ing and chgrp'ing my home directory (chown -R bothner bothner; chgrp -R bothner bothner) doesn't fix it. I can now login from a console or ssh after loging in as root. However I still can't login from the GUI splash screen.
our little sanity-check app should probably check this sort of thing. Check ~/.xsession-errors and /var/log/gdm/* for reasons the login may still be failing.
Your advice was good - .xsession-errors reported "exec: fvwm2: not found". Perhaps this should be displayed to the user. Next problem: I can login but the window manager and panel die. No decorations, no way to move windows, no way to log out. This turned out to be because of an old ~/.gnome directory. I don't know which specific file caused the problem. I've saved the files if you think it is worth trying to look further into it.
Why not go ahead and attach the .gnome file, it's probably a bug worth fixing. Or put it up for ftp/http if its size makes attaching it difficult.
Created attachment 30555 [details] Tar of old ~/.gnome causing wm and panel to die
along a similar vein, a gnome login dies without any kind of useful feedback if the user's cookies in /tmp are owned by the wrong uid or have the wrong permissions.
Moved upstream as: http://bugzilla.gnome.org/show_bug.cgi?id=72563 Closing on RH level
Now fixed upstream and in rawhide, fwiw.