Not accepting password only guest working

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Mon, 2012-12-24 at 09:17 -0500, Mike Holstein wrote:
> 
> On Dec 24, 2012 9:08 AM, "Alex Armani" <alex.armani at rocketmail.com>
> wrote:
> >
> > Hi folks. I'm running Gnome 3.6 usually, and for some reason instead
> of logging in automatically, I get the login prompt, and it's not
> accepting my password, so I can only login as guest. What I don't
> understand, and it's driving me crazy, is that if I go CTRL ALT F2, I
> can login with no problem at all, so I've not changed my password or
> anything. Any help appreciated; thanking you in advance. 
> >
> 
> Its likely just seeming like you are not able to login. Its probably
> something in your ~/.config configuration causing x to crash or not
> load and dump you back out at the login. You can try removing or
> renaming things randomly til you find it.. I would rename the gnome
> specific configs or just move them out of your /home directory
> temporarily to test... cheers!

I suspect you can chroot a foreign Linux by a live CD and change
passwords, however, it's very likely, that the keyboard layout for the
login manager is an en_us layout, while you expect another keymap. So
characters might be different, instead of a "z" you might have to type a
"y" etc., regarding to "qwerty" vs "qwertz" etc..
That's an issue I very often experienced. Often Linux that try to
automate in an insane way, fail very often. Unfortunately Ubuntu is one
of those distros. It might be that the keymap, screen resolution,
monitor frequencies are ok for the desktop environment session, but
before you start the session, it could be completely wrong.

Regards,
Ralf