Hi everyone,

New day, new problem.

I was working on a document with Open Office, tried to save the document in .doc format, and got an error message that a Java runtime machine is missing. I tried to open a firefox browser to start looking for that java machine when my computer totally froze. Didn't respond to any combination of keys (even Ctrl-Alt-F1, I think it's going to runlevel 3).

So I made a hard reboot to the computer. Now I can't login with my old user. After typing the password I get a black screen for a few seconds, and then I get back to the welcome screen of the user name. I can login with root, so I guess something is messed with my user.



Thanks.

If you can get console, login as you, type cp .kde .kdex press enter then type rm -r -f .kde press enter (answer a if you get a choice of y/n/a). Log out of console and try to login via the gui. The most you will lose if this works is you personalized desktop settings which you will find backed up in .kdex, simply copy what you want from there to restore your settings.

Sure, I'm going to try it. but I should have mentioned I use Gnome, not KDE. Does your recommendation still apply?

And a later comment:
I tried to do it, but I don't know where the .kde file is saved. Anyway, I logged in to my user from the terminal and typed "cd..", and got a message that I am not permitted:


So maybe something is wrong with the permissions of the account?


And an even later comment:

I tried running

from root. I didn't help either.

Sorry this is for KDE. I think yours is something like .gconf.

OK, where should I look for it? I took a look in /usr and found many files that begin with gconf, most of them executables.

Ok, I guess sometimes no news is bad news. So if I can't solve the problem, maybe I can work around it?

I thought to remove the problematic user and to make a new user with the same name. Will it work? Will all the preferences and files (Firefox bookmarks, for example) will be associated to the new user?

Thanks.

No it most likely wouldnt work as they would have diffenent uids but you could try to install another desktop like kde or xfce and see it that works....

oh btw maybe you could try to rename or delete .Xauthority from your user account or .serverauth.xxxx

And if I delete the user and then manually set to the new user (with the same name) also the same uid? Still not recommended?

I'm afraid I'm newbie to Linux. Can you direct me to those files you suggest to delete? In what folder ar they saved?

Regarding installing KDE - I tried it once, and the results weren't good. I installed Mandriva from the live CD so I only have Gnome, and I prefer not to get into new adventures at the moment... More than that: Even if I did succeed in installing KDE, that wouldn't help, because I line Gnome much more. I'd like to emphasize that I can log in as root, so I have access to all my files.

they are in your home directory. I also had the same problem once and tried to create a new user with the same name but didnt have much luck

When I'm logged in as root, in my user's (not root's) home directory I see only the "regular" folders (Desktop, Documents, Download, Music, Pictures, Video and tmp).

files and folders starting with a . are hidden, there is probeble an option in nautilus (the gnome file-browser) somewhere to show them but I don't know where....

You're a genius. I owe you my life! It worked! It worked like a charm. It was dark, but then I've seen the light and I've got my life back!

WOW, you really saved me, thanks.