I'm running an Ubuntu 12.04 LTS partition and I've recently have had issues logging in.
From the GUI login screen, when I enter my username and password, it takes me right back to the login screen. This is different from when I enter my username and password incorrectly.
So I entered alt+ctrl+F1 to access the terminal and I signed in.
It then reads:
-bash: /etc/profile Permission denied
From what I've tested, the only commands that I can run from terminal are basic terminal commands like ls and pwd. I tried changing my access to /etc
:
sudo chmod 755 /etc
I get the errors:
sudo: unable to open /etc/sudoers: Permission denied
sudo: no valid sudoers sources found, quitting
sudo: unable to initialize policy plugin
If I run it without sudo I get a permission denied. If someone knows how to get around this issue that would be great
Best Answer
Setting permission to
/etc
:Since the permission of your
/etc
directory isdrw-rw----
, you will not be able to drop down to root privilege to set the right permissions. So you'll have to get a Live Ubuntu media with which you can boot and correct the problems.Boot to a live session, open a terminal and mount the target root partition:
(replace
sdXY
with that of target device, the device for/
; assuming you don't have a separate partition for/etc
.)Make permission changes:
(assuming the permissions for the contents in
/etc
is okay.)P.S. I tried to replicate this by running
sudo chmod 644 /etc
and was able to recover with the steps stated above. However, I encountered additional issues with Unity plugins. The following AU Q&A helped to solve some: