[BALUG-Talk] Lubuntu 14.04 guest session login failure

[Akkana Peck]

Christian Einfeldt writes:
> Right now, however, we are experiencing a failure of logging into the guest
> session.  Normally, you just choose the guest session in the Lubuntu login
> screen, and hit enter, and it boots up a full guest session.  No password
> is required.

If the root account can log in (so you know the desktop is installed
properly), and it starts to log in but bails out, I'd wonder if
there's something in the guest account's .bashrc or .profile, or
other login-time configuration files, that are either preventing
login or causing an immediate logout.

Have you tried logging in on a console? On the machine, try typing
ctrl-alt-F2 to get a text console, and try logging in as guest
there. (Ctrl-alt-F1 or Ctrl-alt-F7 will probably get you back to X,
but if not, try ctrl-alt- with all the function keys and one of them
will probably work.) Or if sshd is set up, try sshing to
guest@themachine from another machine and see if you can log in that
way; if it isn't set up, log in as root and install openssh-server.

If guest can log in via ssh or text console, but not via X, then
you know the problem has something to do with guest's desktop
configuration. Try renaming files or directories or copying them
from root to see what makes a difference.

If guest still can't log in even on a text console, that makes it a
lot easier to debug. With any luck, it'll give you an error message
before it logs you out. If the error message disappears too fast,
then run script on another machine to record the session, then ssh
to the machine. If there's no error message, then from your root
login, try putting debug echo lines in guest's .bashrc and .profile,
like echo starting .bashrc echo ending .bashrc and so forth; you can
use those to see what files are being executed and how far it gets
before things go bad.

Good luck!

        ...Akkana