Login fails with correct password

I’ve got a problem where I get the pretty graphical login screen and with a correct password entry I see the disk check messages clean on tty and then the login prompt reappears. This repeats endlessly.

I’m using a MacBook Pro Mid 2009, 13" model.

This happened before and I reinstalled that time. I’ve seen someone else was having this issue and the recommendation was given to look at the logs using

journalctl -ae -full

As far as I can see some problem seems to have occurred with the gnome starting.


gnome-session[1025]: gnome-session-check-accelerated: GL Helper exited with code 256
gnome-session[1037]: eglGetDisplay() failed
gnome-session[1025]: gnome-session-check-accelerated: GLES Helper exited with code 256
gnome-session[906]: WARNING: software acceleration check failed: Child process exited with code 1
gnome-session[906]: CRITICAL: We failed, but the fail whale is dead. Sorry.... 
lighted[894]: pam_unix(lighted-autologin:session): session closed for user blackmountain

The OS was booting fine and just stopped working in between boots. Not sure how things could have changed.

… answering this via my phone …

I think that model has a nvidia card?

The bit of journal shows that gnome session is failing to setup and interact with xorg … possibly there is further issues above this section of journalctl.

So your issues are basically graphics related and that’s the area that needs to be concentrated on.

If its indeed nvidia related are you running with any nvidia driver? If your not it’s a nouveau opensource driver crash. If you are running with nvidia then likewise its a nvidi driver crash.

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Thanks, yes, I thought it was graphics related because of the egl related messages. The laptop has an Nvidia card.

I tried to enable the Nvidia card and received error messages so I continued using the Nouvea driver.

As far as I can tell I successfully rebooted several times and at some point found this error started occurring. Actually it happened the last try at installing and I did a reinstall.

I’ve got a volume set up for data and apps so I could just copy over the home folder etc and reinstall again, but then I suspect this would just happen again.

I guess I need to find out what the driver status is at this point, ie: which driver is installed and if there is any more specific logging I can find around it.

It turned out that I had earlier attempted to install the Nvidia drivers but this installation failed. However despite that the driver seems to have been registered and overridden the Nouvea one and so there were two listed video drivers (Nvidia and the Nouvea one) when I ran

ubuntu-drivers list

I searched and found the following command for removing the nvidia drivers

sudo apt-get purge nvidia-*

and then I could restart the window manager using

sudo service lightdm restart

This has resolved the issue. I think it explained my earlier problems as I may have attempted the Nvidia driver installation before. So sticking with the Nouvea driver seems safest as I don’t need advanced graphics on this machine in any case.

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Doing a bit more googling around I’ve found some references in other distro’s about the legacy nature of the Nvidia driver (340 final release). It might be a good idea to not recommend its use for older hardware, the current driver install gui would tend to direct users of older gear into selecting something that will cause problems. This may be the root of similar issues people have reported about updates/reboots causing an inability to launch the GUI.

I’ll try to find whatever repo the GUI driver tool is in and see if there’s an issue for this already.