I have a Mandriva 64 bit Gnome 2010 partition on my machine. Whenever I attempt to login, I get two errors, the second possibly as a consequence of the first:

User's $HOME/.dmrc file is being ignored. This prevents the default sessin and language from being saved. File should be owne dby user and have 644 permissions. User's $HOME directory must be owned by user and not writable by other users.

and here's the second:

GDM could not write your authorization file. This could mean that you are out of disk space or that your home directory could not be opened for writing. In any case it is not possible to login. Contact system administrator.

I switched to the command line login (ctrl+alt+f1), and tried to login. It said something like 'user has no home folder' and sent me to a simple bash shell. Then I tried to login as root. I succeeded. Did a

chown -R user /home/user

and after it completed, I was able to login through the command line, but still nothing from GDM. And with either root or my user, trying startx gave me an error indicating that the display was already in use.
After some googling and searching through forums, I saw someone suggest running 'init 3' logging in and trying to startx again as a sort of diagnostic thing, which worked for me. However, the person on that forum didn't end up saying how they eventually fixed GDM, so I didn't know what to do from there.
A couple strange things:

1. Doing chown and chmod will return with no errors, but I am still unable to log on with GDM. Doing startx from root, and using the GUI to navigate to my user's home folder and changing permissions from there will allow me to log in from GDM. But after rebooting, it goes back to the way it was.

2. From the command line, I will log on to my user account. I will su, chown -R user /home/user, and exit. Then I will try to cd to /home/user and it will tell me "Permission denied." Which of course, makes no sense, because I am that user. Checking to make sure the chown operation succeeded, ls -l confirms that /home/user belongs to user.

Is there a way to fix this behavior? Since I am able to eventually login, it isn't a terribly pressing issue, but having to run init 3, then logging in, then doing startx is a bit of a hassle. Suggestions? And thank you in advance.

When you dropped to the command line & entered init 3 what you did was changed the run level. So since 3 is working (and I assume it has the functionality you wish) then you can do one of two things -->

change the default run level to 3:
Edit File-->

The other option is to correct the the error in the default run level for your distro.

Run the command above which will bring up a list of services by runlevel so you compare what is missing. Prior that check what your default is so you have a frame of reference. You can get from the file examined above or by executing the runlevel command at the command prompt.


Hope this helps.