Linux Fedora 25 login screen loop

[WA4GSD]

Saturday I went to wake the machine up and got no response.
Did a hard reboot, took some time to reboot, but it eventually recovered and came up and seemed ok.

Received a system notification Sunday morning about low disk space.
Logged in and found /home at 100%, never a good thing, tried running: sudo du -sh /* to see if I could locate the offending dir(s)... no luck, just a lot of "permission denied".

Thought maybe a reboot would restore sudo, that's when it went south real fast.

Apparently there is a GRUB login loop issue that may occur when Xwin system crashes while a sudo command is in progress (but I think F25 uses Wayland so not sure if it's still the case?).

I can select the user, type in the password, it looks like it's logging in, but returns to the userid screen.

I'm assuming the first unresponsive episode Saturday is what started it.

Can't really find a fix for it at the moment, and the couple fixes I did find are over my head... so I guess I'll rebuild it.

Luckily everything is backed up nightly.

If you're read this far, sorry for the ramble, but that was the low point of my weekend, did get some antenna wiring done and a lot of yard work before it got hot.

Ok, now where did I put that F25 usb iso?

Dan
<sig section under construction>

[n2ize]

How is your drive partitioned ? Is everything just under one root partition ? Or do you have separate partitions for /usr, /, /usr/local, /home, etc ?? Did you try installing and running "bleachbit" ?? It enables you do find and delete cached files, temporary files, and other files that are not critical to a functioning system yet are taking up disc space. Otherwise, when the root partition fills up to 100% things start acting funny and/or not functioning at all.

[WA4GSD]

Partitions: /, /boot, /home /swap

I had bleachbit installed, but my issues was the login loop. It never let me past the password screen.

Machine is mostly rebuilt, was not too bad... some small nits, but will work through them.

I'm done upgrades (23 to 25) by not reformatting the /home partition, just the other 3 and re-installed the s/w.

Dan
<sig section under construction>

[KC2UGV]

Drop to a tty, and log in as root. If the root account isn't enabled, reboot into emergency mode (Or, single user). From there, clean up /home.

You cannot login as a normal user, because normal files cannot be created in your home dir.

[WA4GSD]

KC2UGV,

Thanks for the suggestion. I hope it doesn't happen again, but I should have troubleshot it more when it also happened on a VM. Maybe then I'd have been able to recover this last time. I also need to work at the cmd line more.

Btw, did F25 make it so root cannot access the GUI server? If I try to bring up a gui text editor or gui file manager with sudo it can't connect to the display. It's actually good, because it forces me to drop to the cli, but was wondering.

Thanks.

[KC2UGV]

KC2UGV,

Thanks for the suggestion. I hope it doesn't happen again, but I should have troubleshot it more when it also happened on a VM. Maybe then I'd have been able to recover this last time. I also need to work at the cmd line more.

Btw, did F25 make it so root cannot access the GUI server? If I try to bring up a gui text editor or gui file manager with sudo it can't connect to the display. It's actually good, because it forces me to drop to the cli, but was wondering.

Thanks.

Ah, didn't realize you had it fixed already :)

To bring up a gui app with root perms, use gksudo, it does all the magic with the backend.

[WA4GSD]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.
It's odd that I used to be able to just - sudo gedit -or- sudo dolphin - with F23, but that stopped when I jumped to F25... oh well, will give gksudo a try.

Btw, the XYL and I supported Sweet Meteor O'Death 2016, even have the "Voted for..." swag. :-D

[KC2UGV]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.
It's odd that I used to be able to just - sudo gedit -or- sudo dolphin - with F23, but that stopped when I jumped to F25... oh well, will give gksudo a try.

Btw, the XYL and I supported Sweet Meteor O'Death 2016, even have the "Voted for..." swag. :-D

I might be incorrect, but I believe in between F23 and F25, the switch to Wayland was done.

[n2ize]

Thanks, I'll give that a try.
It's odd that I used to be able to just - sudo gedit -or- sudo dolphin - with F23, but that stopped when I jumped to F25... oh well, will give gksudo a try.

Btw, the XYL and I supported Sweet Meteor O'Death 2016, even have the "Voted for..." swag. :-D
Fedora Linux (and Linux in general) has certainly changed since I first started using it in the late 80's /early 90's when it was called "Red Hat Linux". In those days it was pretty much mandatory that you would have to compile the kernel to add additional hardware support (i.e. sound cards, modems, etc.) These days I haven't had to recompile a kernel in years.

As far as being unable to run GUI apps as root by default I recall that going out the window as early as Fedora 20 or 21. In early versions I could just log in as root via "su root" and it would drop me into a shell from which I could just start X via "startx" and I would be in a GUI session as root from which I could launch any GUI apps. Actually dissallowing that by default does make things quite a bit safer.

[WA4GSD]

Yes, Wayland came in F25 I believe and recent reading this morning it's Wayland causing the issue with sudo... even broke gksudo if I read correctly. Would nee to login with classic Gnome.

Oh well. If it forces me to use the cmd line more, for the better.

[n2ize]

Yes, Wayland came in F25 I believe and recent reading this morning it's Wayland causing the issue with sudo... even broke gksudo if I read correctly. Would nee to login with classic Gnome.

Oh well. If it forces me to use the cmd line more, for the better.

I don't know if this will smooth things out but you could try running the XWayland plug-in which runs an actual X-server within Wayland. I don't know if this will fix the issue with sudo/gksudo. It may also be there by default anyway so

So far the transition to Wayland has been smooth as silk here, in fact up till now I haven't given it much thought. But like any new thing there comes a time where I've got to learn the ins and outs.

Furthermore I mainly use KDE/Plasma which for the most part doesn't work with Wayland & relies on X.