Desktop Environment and TTY will not load

[jarbus]

I'm a big fan of i3-gaps and recently switched over to Manjaro. I was trying to install it over the XFCE desktop environment to replace WM functionality while keeping the rest of XFCE running. I followed the advice fromhttps://archived.forum.manjaro.org/t/how-can-i-install-i3wm-on-top-of-xfce/19638.

This did not work, as it ended up stopping my desktop environment from loading. However, I still was able to access the tty after editing the grub menu. I realized that for some reason startx was no longer being called at startup, so I added startx to my .zshrc, which not only didn't help but also stops me from accessing the tty.

Any and all help is appreciated!

[jarbus]

Additionally, I am unable to boot off of a LiveUSB stick, as I get either CPU soft lock errors or start job pending loops.

[bogdancovaciu]

Boot in runlevel 3.
While in boot grub menu, press e and replace quiet from the linux kernel line with 3. Then press F10 to save and continue booting. It should prompt you in TTY from where you should undo the changes you did.

[jarbus]

I've been doing that to access the TTY, but get the following message after logging in:
xauth: ~./Xauthority not writable, changes will be ignored
xauth: timeout in locking authority file ~/.Xauthority

[bogdancovaciu]

Did you try to repair permissions on your user home directory? Do it from root user from that TTY
chown -R $USER $HOME

[dalto]

@bogdancovaciu

Do it from root user from that TTY
chown -R $USER $HOME

If you login as root, won't $USER be root?

[bogdancovaciu]

It might, good question ...
Probably then better using:
chown -R username:username /home/username
and replace username with the real user name ...

[tbg]

@dalto

If you login as root, won't $USER be root ?

Yes it will be.

instead use:

sudo -u username chown -R username: /home/username

Where you must replace "username" with your actual username. I think I have that right now.

edit: I missed your reply and didn't realize you'd posted this a while ago. You of course always get this stuff right. Mine is simply redundant, sorry for that.

[jarbus]

So after I enter my password in the TTY, it doesn't allow me to enter any other commands because of the ~/.Xauthority messages, which prevent me from using the terminal. Am I able to do this without using the TTY? Or is there a way to change shell from zsh to bash so I can use the TTY?

[dalto]

@tbg

sudo -u username chown -R username: /home/username

Will this work? Won't this run the command chown as "username"? Since the user "username" doesn't currently have access to the files(which is what we are trying to fix), I think this will result in a failure to change the owner.

I think this one is what we want:

@bogdancovaciu

chown -R username:username /home/username
and replace username with the real user name ...

It assumes you have already logged in as root

@jarbus

So after I enter my password in the TTY

Don't login with your user. Login as root

[tbg]

You most likely correct on that I was a little tired when I came up with that one.

[jarbus]

Thank you so much, and thank you for your patience! I'm still new to Linux and didn't know about the ability to log in as root, since I've only ever needed to use my username which has always had root access.

[jarbus]

Thank you so much, this fixed it!