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Can't login as guest to XFCE desktop [Solved]

Posted: 15 Feb 2013, 01:47
by nassausky
I made my first remaster which is very simple and it worked fine at my job but when I took the ISO image home and loaded it to my hard drive, it boots to the login screen and the user guest doesn't work. Each time I type in guest & guest for username and password, the screen flashes and returns to the login screen. I was however able to login as root.

Any ideas?

Thanks

Update: I looked into the .xsession-errors log file and the last line indicated:
mkisofs: Permission denied. Unable to open disc image file '/mnt/porteus.iso'.

Not sure if that has anything to do with the issue

Re: Can't login as guest to XFCE desktop

Posted: 15 Feb 2013, 08:10
by fanthom
looks like you messed permissions on /home/guest folder

EDIT:'\\
after reading this thread: http://forum.porteus.org/viewtopic.php? ... 998#p12998
i'm sure this is the case so please make sure that /home/guest (and all other files inside /guest) are owned by 1000:1000

Re: Can't login as guest to XFCE desktop

Posted: 15 Feb 2013, 13:17
by nassausky
My remastered ISO which I burned boots fine as a CD. As soon as I use Porteus Settings Center and install porteus to the HDD it immediately boots up without permissions. Isn't that a problem with either the make_iso script or the installer script?

Re: Can't login as guest to XFCE desktop

Posted: 15 Feb 2013, 13:40
by brokenman
Without having to remaster another ISO here are some things you can try to troubleshoot your problem.

First try booting with ONLY the base modules. This is done by selecting your boot option at the boot menu and hitting the 'TAB' button so you can edit the boot line. Just add the string: base_only to the end of the boot line and continue to boot. If you can access guest desktop then problem is something in rootcopy, or an extra module you have added.

Next you can try resetting all permissions on guest folder at boot time. Follow the same procedure above only this time add the following to the end of the boot line:

Code: Select all

autoexec=chown~-R~1000:1000~/home/guest
The 'tilde' characters are used instead of spaces which is required in a boot line. If both of these fail then the problem is somewhere within the installer code or the ISO mastering process. As a rule, avoid creating modules and ISO's on a FAT32 file system or things will break.

Re: Can't login as guest to XFCE desktop

Posted: 15 Feb 2013, 13:49
by nassausky
Thanks I gave your reply a quick look-over and will look at it in detail during the day. It's nice how you clarified the boot process and how to set the boot options on that screen. I just didn't think I would have needed to do anything as detailed as you generously detailed in your reply. For now I did simply as you suggested and logged into the desktop as root and gave the /home/guest folder permissions for read & write which worked fine and I was able to login as guest from the desktop without it looping back to the login screen.

It's just funny though that I did the whole process a 2nd time last night. This is what I did:
1) I booted the original Porteus downloaded image from CD, and immediately installed it to the hard drive
2) I just added a single module (tigervnc) which it installs with a few dependencies
3) I just added one line to the rc.local file to startup the module (/usr/bin/vncserver)

After I have the new remastered CD
1) Booted it fine from CD
2) Formatted the HDD and installed the new remasterd CD to the HDD
3) Booted from the HDD and then it looses guest permissions.

Again I will look over the nice instructions you just sent while I'm scratching my head why nobody had the issue before unless it's statistics. 1000 people download porteus and I was 1 out of 1000 that remastered it, burnt it, then put it back on a hard drive to play with it more. I don't know how many people tried porteus but it just has me puzzled.

So I got logged in by changing the permissions as you instructed and I noted my issue was solved but still it remains a question and maybe a bug why the install script locked up the permissions different than the read/write persmissions of the ISO image.
Thanks again to you and everyone that has time to help me out and I hope more people can find this post useful.