CentOS 7.5 Gui Login Root Only

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Taking first steps on CentOS 7 1804.

Logging into the Gnome/Gnome classic desktop from gdm works only for root. For other users, the screen flashes and the login screen returns. KDE/Plasma login is successful but ends up with a black screen with mouse pointer while all desktop processes appear to be running.

The CentOS 7 system is running in a CentOS6 KVM virtual machine, which may be the problem. I have no physical machine for testing right now.

These logins work for non-root users when the system is built from the CentOS 7 DVD. The non-working installation stems from a kickstart install which essentially includes a much larger number of packages, some 6k vs. 2.5k from DVD install). Maybe there are conflicts, but I have not been able to isolate anything.

6 thoughts on - CentOS 7.5 Gui Login Root Only

  • isdtor wrote:
    Sounds like an authorization issue. Have you checked both
    /var/log/messages and /var/log/secure? If you’re using /etc/password, are its permissions and ownership correct? Are the user’s home directories owned by them?

    mark

  • Nothing relevant in these log files. The test user is in NIS and home directory is auto-mounted. All of this works, user can login through text console and ssh. selinux is disabled. But even startx isn’t working, and again the Xorg log doesn’t give any indication what might be the problem.

  • isdtor wrote:
    Now it begins to sound like a video driver problem. What video do you have?

    mark

  • I have seen similar issues when user shell profiles like .bash_profile or
    .bashrc has some errors. Are users invoking other shells from their default shell ? this usually breaks X11 start-up scripts.

    Regards, Prasad

  • Prasad K writes:

    The same user can login find through the gui when the system was installed with the CentOS DVD directly. Package selection was the last option (create workstation or something) with most but not all extra package groups that are selectable at this point.

    This is a KVM machine, I have tried the default (cirrus) and vga, no change.

  • isdtor writes:

    This bug report put me on the right track: https://bugs.freedesktop.org/show_bug.cgi?idf867, with

    /var/log/messages: gnome-session-binary[12345]: ERROR: Failed to connect to system bus: Exhausted all available authentication mechanisms

    and associated YPPROC_DOMAIN not found entries.

    The NIS domain must be defined and correct in /etc/sysconfig/network so that it’s known to dbus when it starts. This is different from CentOS6 and before where the contents of this file largely didn’t matter for NIS and /etc/yp.conf was sufficient.