Re: Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds.

[Paul Trevethan <plist internode on net>]

On Sat, 2005-09-24 at 11:35 -0700, tommie ramirez andujar wrote:
> Hi net:
> 
> I recently upgraded from SUSE 9.3 to SUSE 10 and once I finished, I
> tried to log in using Gnome but I was unable to do so, I keep
> receiving the same message with KDE. I decided to reinstall, not to
> upgrade, but it kept on. Some advice to log in in failsafe and remove
> the .ICEauthority which I did, and nothing happened. Any suggestions.
> This is the error message, I receive.
> ----------------
> Your session only lasted less than 10 seconds. If you have not logged
> out yourself, this could mean that there is some installation problem
> or that you may be out of diskspace. Try logging in with one of the
> failsafe sesions to see if you can fix this problem. 
> ----------------

I have not seen this happen on systems other than Ubuntu, but there it
is quite common. I am guessing that you run k3b for cd burning and that
you run it as superuser from a terminal? In any case, you do something
similar where you run a program as superuser.

What has happened, I think, is that you will find the
ownership/permissions of your .ICEauthority file (note the dot) in your
home directory have been changed to root:root. Then the next time you
try to log in as 'user' you do not have permission to load the file and
you get the error above.

What you can do is log in to a "safe" environment like a failsafe
terminal, as superuser change the ownership of that file; or in fact
delete it as a new one will be created, then log in again as yourself.

This happens in Ubuntu when you you run k3b through the 'sudo' command
so as to get device permissions. The way to overcome it is to always run
k3b through 'gksu k3b' NOT 'sudo k3b'. It may well happen with other
programs that I am not aware of. Anyway, use gksu (under gnome) or kdesu
(under kde) to run programs as superuser.

You can alternatively work out how to have file permissions set up to
allow k3b to run properly as normal user. This whole device permission
stuff is my only real complaint against k3b (cdrecord backend actually).

Good luck.
Paul.