Login problem after updating

Hi i update lubuntu to version 20.04 and Now I can’t even log in! Every time I press enter after my password it takes me back to the login screen! Does anyone know how to fix it?

You haven’t said what release you upgraded from, as it may have bearing on this issue.

If you switch to text terminal (eg. CtrlAltF4) can you login? In my experience, the main reason I get a login loop (I enter password, login starts but then fails causing you to logout and return to greeter) is lack of disk space in $HOME or your user directory.

If you can login to [text] terminal, I’d explore the disk space you have available (df -h), esp. in your /home partition (if it’s separate). If insufficient space is available in $HOME, a GUI login cannot proceed and is thus aborted without error message.

If you don’t have a separate home partition, the space used during the upgrade may need to be re-claimed before a GUI login can work; ie. sudo apt autoclean.

There are other causes too, but I don’t know what your upgrade was from, so I won’t go further.

My lubuntu version before upgrading was 18.04.5

There maybe extra complications with an upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04 that are unsupported here.

In the release notes, you’ll read the following

Note, due to the extensive changes required for the shift in desktop environments, the Lubuntu team does not support upgrading from 18.04 or below to any greater release. Doing so will result in a broken system. If you are on 18.04 or below and would like to upgrade, please do a fresh install.

I would till login via text terminal and check you have space.

ps: that note existed in all release notes from 18.10 onwards; and only apply with 18.04 or the last LXDE release, because of the switch to LXQt in subsequent releases. Upgrades from Lubuntu 18.10 up are supported.

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I can’t login in text terminal just sey login incorrect.
Plz help

This won’t be very user friendly, but I’ll write my thoughts.

I would boot it with quiet splash removed from the kernel line to view boot messages and look for something a-miss. If you’re not familiar with doing this, and don’t know what your boot messages normally look like, then you won’t gain much with this.

I’d likely next boot live media (such as Lubuntu 20.04 LTS install media) and check everything looks correct on your installed system (not the live system, but your installation on disk). I would probably look at the /etc/passwd & /etc/shadow file, particularly the dates last modified to see if anything there has changed. My own system shows the last change was 29-Oct-2020 & I no longer have any idea what I did on that day, but that’s after my last release-bump (a week after my bump to hirsute) so it tells me nothing (I wouldn’t expect an release-upgrade to touch that file, but I don’t know). I’d also look at the hash of your password; probably using the live session to create a comparison hash, but I really can’t see how this is your issue…

It maybe related to specifics in your hardware; but we have no details of that.

However you’ve performed an unsupported upgrade, so in your case, I’d really consider following the suggested clean install which is the fully supported Lubuntu way.

I’ll also suggest (as me, this is not an official recommendation), or consider an unclean install, which in my own testing works well, in fact is something I’ve done rather often of late to test installs on boxes I actually have my own data on (avoiding any data restoration post-install test).

You should already have your backups (performed back on 18.04 prior to upgrade to 20.04), but if not I’d make some using the live media.

The unclean install I mean, is

  • using “Manual Partitioning”,
  • selecting your existing partition(s) and ensure you don’t have format checked, especially on your ‘/home’ partition. I actually recommend formatting your ‘/’ partition, it’s your /home you don’t want to format. If you don’t have separate ‘/’ and ‘/home’; you can’t format “/”, but most of my testing was with separate /home as it’s what I use (I did do some testing with single partition too, the result with single partition may not be as neat as it may try and re-install packages from LXDE you are now better without (the format checkbox causes format of course, but also alters the install; no format of ‘/’ will cause packages you’ve added to be noted & attempted to be re-installed post-install). The results will vary on what you had installed in 18.04 and how the packages were installed.

As I mentioned before, and is covered in the release notes of every release of Lubuntu since 18.10

due to the extensive changes required for the shift in desktop environments, the Lubuntu team does not support upgrading from 18.04 or below to any greater release. Doing so will result in a broken system. If you are on 18.04 or below and would like to upgrade, please do a fresh install.

You attempted an unsupported upgrade, so I’m going to have to recommend upgrade via re-install. It’s very likely what I’d do (I’d play with fixing the install anyway just for fun, but I’d for sure consider re-install anyway, even once it’s fixed as it’s a nicer experience with re-install due to desktop change).

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