Can't get past login screen [SOLVED]

[brunnhilde]

Hi everybody, I searched the forums but couldn't find anything so I hope someone can help.

I use LMDE and I was trying to install japanese language support but I must have done something wrong because now I can't log in. At one point I had to restart the computer and now I get the login screen (when I used to login automatically), I type the password over and over again but I get the same login screen and can't get past that. I'm writing from my XP partition in the meantime but all my files and stuff from work are in the linux part so I can't get anything done.

Here's what I did, step by step, hoping someone can point out what I did wrong and how to get it right again.

Via synaptic installed anthy, scim, scim-anthy, scim-tables-ja, scim-bridge-agent and scim-bridge-client-gtk.
Then via terminal:

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# dpkg-reconfigure locales

where I choose 'ja_JP.UTF-8' and hit enter. Then:

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# gedit /etc/scim/global

and where it says 'SupportedUnicodeLocales' I added 'ja_JP.UTF-8'. Then:

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# gedit /etc/scim/config

and where it says '/FrontEnd/X11/Dynamic = false' I changed false to true. Then:

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# im-switch -s none

but as it turns out, 'im-switch' was not installed. I checked synaptic and instead I had 'im-config' installed so at the terminal I did:

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# im-config -s none

This time a window showed up with options like 'use default', 'use scim', 'automatic', etc but rather than change something there I cancelled and went back to synaptic to install 'im-switch', which in turn had to uninstall 'im-config'. Then I went back to terminal and did:

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# im-switch -s none

and apparently nothing hapenned so I thought it was okay, then restarted and that was it, now I can't log in.

Sorry for the long post, but I'm starting to get frustrated since I have all of my work on my Mint partition can someone help me correct this?

Thanks a lot!

[sgosnell]

You'll have to put in the correct password. I don't know what happened to your automatic login, but until you log in successfully, you can't change it back. Make sure the caps lock isn't on, and that you're using English as the input language, since that appears to be what you had before.

[brunnhilde]

I know I'm typing the correct password because I can log in doing Ctrl + F2. It's just the login screen I have problem with Maybe I accidentally changed the default language and my password isn't recognized anymore, but how come I can log in without problem on text mode? and more important, how can i change it back if that's the problem?

[sgosnell]

I don't know. The console is obviously using English, but if the login screen is using Japanese, I don't know how scim is set to change the input language. Sometimes it's Ctrl-space, sometimes something else. I've never tried completely changing the input method, just adding another alongside, and it didn't require installing scim. I wish I had a better answer, but that's all I can come up with at the moment.

[brunnhilde]

Thank you sgosnell, I'll keep checking.

By the way, how did you install a second language without scim? That's what I was trying to do and, once I succeed in getting past the login screen, I need to have japanese working smoothly along english. Just curious...

[sgosnell]

I don't really remember. I installed Korean for my wife to use, but it's been a long time since I did it. I'll have to do some research on it. I think I installed the language pack when I installed LMDE on her computer, but I'm not sure.

Korean doesn't really require scim, I don't think. The alphabet isn't larger than the Roman alphabet, so it only requires the standard letter keys with shift. The ibus takes care of the translation, AFAIK. I know nothing of Japanese, unfortunately.

Edit again: Try running "sudo dpkg-reconfigure locales" in the console, and setting the default to English. If that lets you log in, you can change the input method there and change the password if you like, or reset the automatic login. Might not work, but it's worth a try.

[brunnhilde]

It was a worth a try but didn't work I set the default to English but still couldn't log in.
At this point I'm considering reinstalling the damn thing but I'd like to backup all the programs I've installed since I've had Mint for the past couple of months and pretty much had everything working the way I wanted (except for Japanese, that is), if I can't get this fixed, is it possible to backup my programs using a live CD or something like that?

By the way thank you sgosnell, I really appreciate you're taking the time to try and help me

[xircon]

As you can log into a terminal, setup a new user:

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adduser newusername
 passwd newusername

Log into the new user, launch terminal, change the permissions and group of your old files (as root) and copy them over.

[sgosnell]

You can restore your packages after a new install by doing the following first:

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dpkg --get-selections > ~/my-packages

Store that file someplace where you can recover it after the reinstallation, and after installing/reinstalling, run

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sudo dpkg --set-selections < my-packages && sudo apt-get dselect-upgrade

You can name the file anything you want, not necessarily my-packages, and you may have to supply the full path if it's not in your /home. This won't actually back up the files, it just makes a list of all installed packages, and lets you quickly (relatively) and easily reinstall them from the repositories. Packages not in the repositories will still have to be manually installed, but you'll have a list. It's not perfect, but it's better than nothing. You can use remastersys to make a full backup of your system, but that might not be the best idea if it's borked, because you'll get the same borked system back. Clonezilla supposedly does the same thing, but I've never used it. Back up /home completely in any case, and you should do that on a regular basis. Rsync (or grsync if you like a gui) will keep it up to date, especially if you use a cron job to do it in the background. You just need a backup drive connected for it to do the backup.

[brunnhilde]

Luckily no need to reinstall. Per someone else's suggestion (though it should've been obvious to me... duh) in text mode I undid my footsteps and uninstalled everything related to scim, reinstalled im-config, restarted and now my session starts automatically again.

Thanks to everyone who replied!