Arch Linux

Laplace's Daemon

Member

Registered: 2007-08-14

Posts: 30

Help! "Unable to cd to $HOME" when trying to log in as non-root user.

Today I upgraded to the latest kernel and was trying to install a Samsung printer driver in Arch64 when things went downhill and I had to do a hard restart.  I rebooted the computer and it froze at the kdm login page and didn't respond to the keyboard or mouse.  I can get the computer working in run level 1 or 3, but can only log into the root account.

I checked all permission settings and it seems to all be correct (i.e., home folders are owned by the correct users, executable files in /bin, /usr/bin are owned by root and executable by everyone).  Trying to log into any user account from a tty gives the message

"Unable to cd to $HOME"

where it gives the location of the user's home directory.

What is wrong and how do I fix it?

Edit:  I should also add that trying "su [user]" (from root) gives the error

su: /bin/bash: Permission denied

/bin/bash is -rwxr-xr-x and /bin/su is -r-sr-xr-x.  Both are owned by the root user and group.

Last edited by Laplace's Daemon (2008-12-24 01:54:34)

Aprz

Member

From: Newark

Registered: 2008-05-28

Posts: 277

Re: Help! "Unable to cd to $HOME" when trying to log in as non-root user.

For runlevel 5 not working, have you tried adding to /etc/X11/xorg.conf:

Section "ServerFlags"
     Options "AutoAddDevices" "False"
EndSection

There was a really recent update that caused people to not be able to use their mouse or keyboard with Xorg.

I was Googling and the first result happened to be from the Ubuntu forums so I don't know how trust worthy it is (I generally don't trust the Ubuntu forum because it seems like a lot of their fixes is to reinstall stuff, haha, like at the top of the page what the kind folks were suggesting in the URL below) or if the fix is even a good fix, but it seems like somebody had the same problem as you because the permission for root was all messed up.. and they solved it with the chmod command.

http://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-354643.html

Very bottom of the page. Somewhat makes sense to me since the directories within a directory some what inhieret their permissions (not exactly, but sort of...).

Last edited by Aprz (2008-12-24 03:43:54)

Laplace's Daemon

Member

Registered: 2007-08-14

Posts: 30

Re: Help! "Unable to cd to $HOME" when trying to log in as non-root user.

Thanks!  Fixing the permissions of / did the trick.  Lesson learned: be very careful about installing third party software when your umask is set to 0077

Mr.Elendig

#archlinux@freenode channel op

From: The intertubes

Registered: 2004-11-07

Posts: 4,094

Re: Help! "Unable to cd to $HOME" when trying to log in as non-root user.

Thanks!  Fixing the permissions of / did the trick.  Lesson learned: be very careful about installing third party software when your umask is set to 0077

Always use pacman or makepkg to install apps.

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Evil #archlinux@libera.chat channel op and general support dude.
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