Suddenly and without an obvious precipitating incident, when I login, my home is / instead of /home/user/
This creates a lot of problems, obviously, since all sorts of things expect ~/ to be user writable, and expect to find a config in ~/
This happens whether I log in to the GUI, or whether I log in via SSH or TTY. My home is set correctly in /etc/password or if queried using getent. It seems to me that obviously my profile is somehow failing to load. I created a new user “temp” and this loads fine, and user temp is set to /home/temp/ as one would expect.
Is there anywhere I can look to see where and why this is failing?
What’s a precipitating incident, Preciousss? We has never heard of precipitating incidentses before. Is it juicy and deliciousss? Does it comes falling out of the sky like raindropses?
The most common reason for this sort of thing is that the permissions on /home/${USER} have been modified, with as a result that your user account doesn’t have read and execute permission on it anymore, or that your $HOMEhas become owned by another user — usually root, as a result of using a GUI file manager with root privileges. In that case, the system will still allow you to log in — because your user account is still valid — but will not cd into your $HOME anymore.
When logged in as yourself, check your permissions, and the file ownership.
/home/me still shows as maxsone:maxsone with drwx— etc. Is there a logfile I can look at that might give me some idea where the system is choking?
(I’m not copying and pasting, since I I’m writing this from a test profile, and it’s not convenient to dump output back and forth, but if a more accurate and precise output would be helpful, I can.)
