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I have added 3 new users to the system via a terminal session and defined their password. However at the GUI logon screen when I click on their account and put in the password I get the spinning wheel then it goes right back out to the login screen. No errors or nothing. What could be wrong here? I can get in with the account that was created at OS installation is there a log I can look at perhaps in /var/log?

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    Which front end display manager are you using, gnome, kde, etc.? What tool or command did you use to add the users? Can you login as the new user from the terminal?
    – bsd
    Sep 11, 2014 at 8:51
  • Similarly the log from /var/log/auth.log at the time of login will be helpful, assuming you are using Ubuntu as you had mentioned in your last question. Please provide such information in the question itself.
    – beginer
    Sep 11, 2014 at 8:59

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Yea the new users can log in via SSH but I got it sorted - the new users did not have access to their own home DIR's. Once I ran chown and chgrp to grant them access, they were able to log in from the GUI. problem solved. thanks!

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Here is some more info and potential problems when loging in via GUI or something else.

  • If the home directory of a user does not exist, or the user has no permission to access it,

    • login via GUI tends to fail;
    • while login via su or ssh succeeds, complaining cannot chdir to home directory.

  • If the login shell of a user does not exist, or the user has no permission to access it,

    • login via GUI succeeds, using sh as the shell;
    • while login via su or ssh fails.

Both the home directory and login shell of a user is specified in /etc/passwd. Refer to man 5 passwd for more info.

You may use chsh to change the login shell, and usermod to change home directory and login shell as well. You may also choose to edit /etc/passwd directly, but always be careful.

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