After a non destructive partition resizing in Gparted Live CD, I found that my Debian installation which used to work perfectly fine till then wouldnt start X
I would get a graphical login screen, but the moment I entered my username and password, it would take me back to the same login screen.
I tried to diagnose what could possibly have gone wrong. Initially I thought it was an Nvidia driver issue. So I remove and recompiled the Nvidia kernel module with module-assistant (m-a). But the issue persisted.
So I ran the following:
startx -- :1 less /var/log/Xorg.0.log less /var/log/Xorg.1.log
It gave me an error that:
Couldn't open compiled keymap /var/lib/xkb/server-0.xkm XKB: Failed to compile keymap
Tracing the issue further I found that one user reported having this issue after he found that /tmp wasnt writable. Sure enough I found that /tmp was root owned and did not have write permissions for others.
So a simple
chmod 777 /tmp service kdm stop service kdm restart
and KDE configuration popped up, allowing my normal login. As part of the process I lost my KDE4 settings, but that was fine.
Joel G Mathew, known in tech circles by the pseudonym Droidzone, is an opensource and programming enthusiast.
He is a full stack developer, whose favorite languages are currently Python and Vue.js. He is also fluent in Javascript, Flutter/Dart, Perl, PHP, SQL, C and bash shell scripting. He loves Linux, and can often be found tinkering with linux kernel code, and source code for GNU applications. He used to be an active developer on XDA forums, and his tinkered ROMS used to be very popular in the early 2000s.
His favorite pastime is grappling with GNU compilers, discovering newer Linux secrets, writing scripts, hacking roms, and programs (nothing illegal), reading, blogging. and testing out the latest gadgets.
When away from the tech world, Dr Joel G. Mathew is a practising ENT Surgeon, busy with surgeries and clinical practise.