Mint 12 Login Issue

[silvius_discipulus]

Hola,

I seem to have messed up my Mint 12 user account somehow... after I log in, all I see is a few lines of the usual shut down script and then I am kicked right back to the login screen. This will happen over and over again. I cannot access my account. I can, however, log in as a guest. I know that I have critically low hard drive space at the moment, not sure if that might have something to do with this. Any ideas what's going on here? How do I fix this?

[esteban1uy]

Press the "s" key while your machine is booting. You'll be presented with the Grub menu, then select the "Recovery Mode" and press Enter.
Once in Recovery mode, log in as root and execute the following command:

Code: Select all

apt-get clean

Then:

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reboot

Any changes?

[silvius_discipulus]

Finally got to try this. Booting into recovery mode then trying to log in didn't change much; the screen flickers more, but I am still sent right back to the login screen. Using the recovery menu, I dropped down to shell prompt and tried "apt-get clean," but I was told that my system is "not using locking" for some lock file or something like that, and nothing happens. I ran disk check for laughs and it didn't change anything either. Ugh.
As I said in my previous post, I can log in as a guest. I get warnings that I have zero free space in the home folder but I can still get around. Is there a way I can gain access to my user account's home folder from the guest account and free up space from there?

[silvius_discipulus]

Still stuck on this one... do I need to provide more info? Can I access my home folder from the guest account to copy/delete files that way?

[esteban1uy]

You should start your machine in recovery mode (as explained before) and log in as root, then use apt-get clean to free some disk space, or navigate to the /home/your-personal-folder and delete some files. There's no need to start a x session, you can do all that stuff in console mode and then reboot.

[silvius_discipulus]

Sorry, I'm not sure how to get root access... what do I do?

[esteban1uy]

Use the name root as user name and the password you choose when you installed the system.