Help can't login!

[William Scott Lockwood III]

On Mon, Sep 16, 2013 at 7:11 AM, Liam Proven <lproven at gmail.com> wrote:
> On 16 September 2013 13:06, Pete Smout <smoutpete at gmail.com> wrote:
>> Hi, Iam currently logged in graphically as my new user (full permissions)
>> and into tty1 as Pete (original user account) so access to the machine is no
>> longer a problem, but now it is like the missing answer in a crossword, I
>> need to know the answer!
>
>
> OK - and have you successfully taken ownership of all the files in
> your home directory?
>
> The way I'd do it would be:
>
> $ whoami
> fred
>
> $ su pete
>
> $ whoami
>
> pete
>
> $ cd ~
> $ pwd
>
> /home/pete
>
> $ chown -R pete:pete *

At which point the command likely fails to have the desired effect. if
pete is just a regular user, he's likely screwed. If pete is in
sudoers, he can preface that command with sudo, and it will then work,
though it won't get hidden files and directories. a better command
would be

$ sudo chown -R pete:pete .

which will get the current directory an all things below it
recursively, and will match hidden files.

> $ ls -la
>
> Then check you own everything, and try logging in again from the
> graphical login screen.
>
> FWIW I've had similar problems myself.

Scott