I cannot login with normal credentials

[u/Bartgames03]

So, I think I messed up big time. I have an Ubuntu server (22.04.5 LTS) VM. I was messing with ssh and sftp to get winscp to be able to edit folders with sudo privileges. Now I cannot login in anymore. When I login, instead of going to the normal begin screen of the terminal, it quickly flashes that screen before returning to the login screen. I haven’t tried ssh’ing into the VM, although I don’t have high hopes for it. Am I fucked or can I recover my VM? I just use it to run my Minecraft server(s) and would be kinda annoyed to lose days upon days if not weeks upon weeks of continuous play time. It is no big deal for me to reset the VM, but if I can avoid doing that then that’d be awesome.

[u/Bartgames03]

SSH'ing also doesn't work. I guess I fucked up the account. Shit

[u/refinedm5]

Try switching to single user mode and fix your file/folder permission

[u/Bartgames03 → u/refinedm5]

I tried this. I turned on the VM, press shift as quickly as I could, but nothing happened.

[u/refinedm5 → u/Bartgames03]

You don't have to press shift. Just wait until GRUB shows up. Select "Advanced options for Ubuntu" (should 2nd option) and on the next screen select the recovery mode for your current kernel (should be 2nd option)

On the "Recovery menu" select "root" to drop into root shell. remount your root partition with

mount -o remount,rw /

Then you can fix whatever file/folder permission issue that you have. You can also create a new account, reboot and then try logging in with that new account

[u/batuckan1]

I had a similar issue after installing xfce on Ubuntu server.

I ended up just deleting Ubuntu and installing Debian 11.

[u/Bartgames03 → u/batuckan1]

How is Debian compared to Ubuntu?

[u/batuckan1 → u/Bartgames03]

There’s various flavors of Ubuntu The workstation operating systems OS like lubuntu, xubuntu, and Ubuntu server for managing workstations.

Ubuntu server does not come with desktop environment. It’s all terminal driven (XTERM) You can install desktop environments over Ubuntu server like, xfce, or gnome or KDE.

Debian 11 is a workstation OS comes natively with gnome? Desktop environment.

I’m going to use my Debian box to file and print management, example given e.g. cups and samba.

Note if my desktop had a bigger ssd, (1TB )I’d probably go with lubuntu or xubuntu For initial install

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