I have a friend running Ubuntu 9.10 with both Gnome and KDE. He cannot log into his KDE desktop; it just takes him back to his login screen after a 20 second wait. He's running gdm as a display manager, which by all rights should work fine as far as i know. Does anyone know what the problem might be?

First, can he login to a terminal? There should be an option for a failsafe login. Is so, have him make sure he owns all the files in his home directory.

I thought of that after I posted; no go. I also had him try creating a new user account. He got further... it got past the splash screen and started to display the desktop when it suddenly took him back to the login screen.

What graphics card is he using? I have had similar things happen with x11-related problems. Is there a way in Ubuntu to reset his xorg.conf to its default settings? First, he might want to try renaming his xorg.conf to something like BACKxorg.conf.back or something like that, then try rebooting. Since he is using a recent kernel it should boot fine without an xorg.conf. If that fixes things and he is using an integrated graphics card he should be fine. If he is using ATI or nvidia he will need a minimal xorg.conf. I can tell you how to make one for NVidia cards but not for ATI cards.

I'll ask him about the graphics card. I know how to do it with Nvidia, but (like you) not with ATI.

Could it be, that his partition/hdd ran out of space?

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df -h

Thought of that, thanks. He's got plenty of room. I'm tapped out here; I've tried every trick I know. There's something seriously wrong with his installation.

Can you please try to login, then when it fails login on a virtual terminal and post the contents of ~/.xsession-errors here.

bcooksley wrote:Can you please try to login, then when it fails login on a virtual terminal and post the contents of ~/.xsession-errors here.

I'm still waiting to hear back from him on this.

Hi everyone, I'm having the same problem, when looking in ~/.xsession-errors I find:

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** (<unknown>:4706): CRITICAL **: atk_object_set_name: assertion `name != NULL' failed
kdeinit4: Aborting. bind() failed: Permission denied
Could not bind to socket '/home/matthew/.kde/socket-matthew-desktop/kdeinit4__0'


Didn't think there was a point in creating a new thread

UPDATE:
I've fixed it by changing the permissions on the .KDE folder:

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sudo chown -R matthew:matthew .kde
sudo chmod -R +rw


hope this helps