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I'm using Xubuntu and now the login dialog box shows Guest instead of my login name. I've been all over the net and read what lightdm documentation I could find but have not found a solution, let alone how the greeter decides what to put up on that login dialog box. Can anyone provide some guidance?

EDIT: It seems that the problem is caused by a UID less than 1000, although changing the UID back to 1000 does not revert the behavior - the greeter wants to login a guest.

critter43
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    Have you tried this? http://askubuntu.com/questions/331776/login-loop-can-only-login-as-guest-ubuntu-12-04#379988

    I know its ubuntu but the procedures should be the same

     – Cyber_Star Mar 03 '17 at 21:21
  • Did you make any changes to your system or profile immediately before this happened? – Joseph Sible-Reinstate Monica Mar 04 '17 at 01:37
  • @Cyber_Star - yes, I have tried everything I could find on the net – critter43 Mar 04 '17 at 13:52
  • @Joseph - I moved the install to a different partition, fixing up grub and fstab, and changing hid:gid to match the servers I use. I need to find out what file is involved in presenting that login dialog box but can't find that information anywhere. – critter43 Mar 04 '17 at 13:55
  • By hid:gid, do you mean uid:gid? If so, that's almost certainly what did it. What did you change them to, and are you sure you changed them everywhere? – Joseph Sible-Reinstate Monica Mar 04 '17 at 15:24
  • @JosephSible re: hid:gid - I hate typing correctors. Yes - typo. Yes - everywhere. I used chown -R uid:gid home_dir like always. If that is the problem, where is the old uid stashed so I can fix it? Failing that, how can I get Ubuntu to let me specify uid:gid? Or is it that greeter ignores any uid less than 1000? If so, where is that checked? – critter43 Mar 04 '17 at 17:46

2 Answers2

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The greeter ignores users with UIDs of under 1000, so when you changed your user's UID to less than that, it disappeared. I personally recommend that you fix it by putting its UID back. If you can't do that, How to make users with UID under 1000 appear in LightDM? gives some ways that apparently will let you show it anyway.

Community
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Joseph Sible-Reinstate Monica
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  • Thanks very much for the link. I have searched for hours and did not find that one. Putting the UID back causes more problems than having to choose other to log in. I strongly suspect this is the answer – critter43 Mar 06 '17 at 12:55
  • Nope - users.conf was already set to 500 minimum and changing login.defs had no effect. – critter43 Mar 06 '17 at 13:25
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From the Recovery Mode you can add another user to your login screen using these steps.
(Press ESC when booting to bring up the grub menu.)

Bring up the grub boot menu.

(Select) Advance -> ENTER -> (select) Recovery Mode -> ENTER -> (select) Drop to root shell prompt -> ENTER -> ENTER

At the prompt type these commands:

# mount -o remount,rw /
# adduser testuser
# addgroup testuser sudo
# exit

Now on the GUI continue with:

(Select) Resume -> ENTER -> ENTER

Now login using the newly created account and perform your maintenance.

L. D. James
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