Xfce session will not login from login prompt. Why?

Solution 1:

For me the only way I can get into Xfce UI is this:

• Ctrl+Alt+F1 and login as you (i.e using your username).
• rm ~/.Xauthority
• Ctrl+Alt+F7 (change to the current X-server tty) and login.

I have to do this EVERY time I reboot. It sucks! I would really appreciate if somebody could find a proper way to fix this.

Solution 2:

Yep, turns out if you sudo vncserver, it jacks with the .Xauthority file under the /home/user directory. You are only supposed to start vncserver as a user.

Sooooo...

I did sudo chmod 777 /home/user/.Xauthority and there I am able to log in. I did come across some rather lousy literature on creating a new .Xauthority file, but I will dig further until I find something better.

Solution 3:

(Adding this because it might help someone in the future.)

In my case the problem was, that the owner of /home/user/ was root:

user@host:~$ ls -l /home/
total 4
drwxr-x--- 10 root root 4096 Jul 19 16:31 user

So I fixed it by changing the user and group:

sudo chown -hR user:user /home/user/

You might want to change the command according to you username.