Fairly recently, logins started to give a little dialog box saying
"Could not update ICEauthority file /home/kevin/.ICEauthority"

Clicking "close", things seem to proceed normally. The login and its desktop are usable. But this is annoying.

From ls -l .ICEauthority, I get
-rw------- 1 kevin kevin 30725 2010-11-13 19:49 .ICEauthority

I have tried renaming this file away, and still get the same message, so I
renamed it back.

I see another similar thread, but they couldn't finish logging in, and their fix does not apply to
me because my home directory is already 0755.
I have no idea what this file is for, or what to do about it.

Help?

I did some searching on this issue, and all the info I could find points to a permissions issue with .ICEauthority.
Have you been running the system as root, or launching graphical apps with sudo?
See these threads for possible solutions:
http://art.ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?p=8061988
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=949750

Also check that you haven't run out of disk space.

I had this issue this morning after reinstalling openSuSe 11.3 and resolved it by the following:

Open a SU terminal in /home/youruser

enter: chown yourusername:users .ICEauthority

This sets the ownership to yourusername:users

Reboot and all should be fine. There are quite a few solutions out there and most advise to chmod to 644 or 777 however a few experts have strictly advised against this as it opens the file to the world and is more of a brute work around than a solution with finesse.

If you use this advise please give me some rep, I would like to get off of zero

2 members found this post helpful.

I had this error message in Natty, your solution worked fine. Thanks

Mark

My system crashed during an upgrade to Natty Narwhal. It refused to try to fix that, but instead wanted to go straight to Oneiric Ocelot. I crossed my fingers, having little other choice. Amazingly, it seemed to do the full upgrade. But then I found that I had this thread's issue.

I tried many of the suggested owner:group and permission fixes, but none had any effect. I couldn't get into Gnome, but I had SSH access, so I could make changes from there. The final fix for me was:

sudo apt-get install lxde

Then reboot (it went to lxde), and log in to Gnome to verify that it was working. Then because I didn't need it:

sudo apt-get autoremove lxde

That's all, and everything is fine now.