Re: [LUG] Mint 19.x Login Weirdness: SOLVED

[mr meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx>]

On 19/11/2019 12:12, Julian Hall wrote:

> Finally, actually solved. 19.0 didn't like the /home folder - probably 
> some 19.2 config. files - so I downloaded a 19.2 iso and put that on a 
> USB stick. After a fresh install from that I am now able to log into 
> Mint 19.2 with my original login and /home folder.
> 
> One wrinkle I discovered along the way; I used my laptop to download the 
> iso and that complained about a lack of space on / too. As I hardly use 
> it that made me suspicious, and investigation showed that Timeshift had 
> been enabled somehow and had take 11Gb(!) of space with backups. I 
> disabled it which reclaimed the space, but it's worth noting for Mint 19 
> users. When I reinstalled on the desktop I disabled Timeshift straight 
> away.


I didn't want to say anything before but yeah, I guess it is kind of 
solved now... sort of. You still  never even diagnosed the initial 
problem and carpet bombed it out of existence by basically reinstalling 
the entire laptop from scratch and copying in some/most of your home 
folder contents afterwards. That is not a backup/restore and it's 
definitely not fixing the problem either if you see what I mean so 
technically you _still_ haven't solved anything!

But you did fix it, and mostly by yourself to be fair, so ultimately you 
won in the end. However you have hopefully learned multiple things along 
the way:

1: actually diagnose and fix problems properly, don't just nuke the OS 
from orbit
2: your backups were good but your restore process was terrible as you 
found out to your cost
3: don't just whack random files and repeat in a loop until you 
accidentally chance across a bodged fix - see #1
4: don't let arbitrary services eat all your disk space

By the way, do you want to know how you caused the problem in the first 
place? It's because you've got a (really, really) bad habit of running 
gui apps with sudo or as root. That's how the ownership of your 
Xauthority file got borked. Once root owns Xauthority in your home 
directory the actual user can no longer access it and that was 
preventing your login (using Xorg - tty and ssh still worked because 
they don't require it obviously). This is also why journalctl didn't 
have any errors to report - technically there weren't any as the systemd 
units were still firing correctly and the issue was elsewhere. "cat 
/var/log/Xorg.0.log" would have shown this immediately (and I was stupid 
for not immediately recommending this - I even knew it was Xorg that was 
the issue).

Well live and learn my friend, you did fix it to be fair!

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