Debian login loop [closed]

Question

If I try to login on a Debian with XFCE it gets a blackscreen for a few seconds, then it flashes really short and puts me back at the login screen.

The strange thing is, if I go into a terminal using Ctrl + Alt + F1 (Or any other F key) I can login, and get into the GUI using startx. Everything works like usual.

I installed Debian the same way on 4 different machines but none of them had this error.

I used debian-8.2.0-i386-xfce.iso for installation with a USB stick.

Somebody has a idea what could cause this behavior?

Answer 1

After some research, I found an entry at Debian User Forums, where someone had almost the same issue, except that I could use startx and he didn't. The problem was that some of the hidden files inside the users home directory were owned by root. I still don't know why I could start the xserver from command line but at least I can login now with the GUI again.

The solution

I went into the command line using CTRL + ALT+ F1

Then I logged in as root and did a ls inside the home directory of the corrupted user.

cd /home/username -> ls -la

("-la" list hidden files, and the owner of the files)

depending on how many files are owned by root you can change the rights for seperate files, or be lazy like me and do:

chmod a+rwx *

(chmod changes the permissions for a usergroup)

• "a" means for ALL users (i have just one user on the machine)
• "+" means to ADD rights
• "rwx" means read, write and execute
• and * means all files inside this directory

That means, all users can now read, write (modify) and execute this files.

I know, its maybe not the cleanest solution but it worked for me.

Answer 2

I had the same problem using Jessie 8.6 with the kernel 4.7 with cinnamon, and I did almost the same: I just changed the ownership of the /home/user/.Xauthority file and it also worked:

chown user.user ./.Xauthority

Answer 3

I had this problem this morning and none of these fixes were working for me.

It turns out this was happening because my disk was full.

Deleting some large unused files fixed it after a restart.

Answer 4

This problem may occur due to corrupted xsession file, fix it by installing lxsession

sudo apt-get install lxsession