I don't know if this is the right component to file this issue under, so please feel free to move as appropriate.

I had two accounts on my system. One is 'duffy' which is my user and has full privileges. The other was 'foobar', which was for testing purposes and was set to auto login.

I had a lot of trouble deleting user 'foobar.' I would try to delete it from the 'user accounts' panel in the control center, but the control center would tell me that 'foobar' was still logged in - even though it wasn't. Ray helped me delete the account off of my system, but I don't know what he did to make it happen.

That was Friday. I got into work this morning after a 3 day weekend and booted my machine - except it would not boot. It was stuck on a black screen with a spinner and would never get to GDM even after 15 minutes.

It turns out that even though the 'foobar' user was deleted off of the system, it was still set to auto-login, so the system was stuck trying to auto-login an account that does not exist. We discovered this by looking in /etc/gdm/custom.conf where it said the following even though foobar doesn't exist:

[daemon]

AutomaticLoginEnable=True
AutomaticLogin=foobar

Commenting out those lines allowed me to get to GDM and access a working desktop again.

Maybe the trouble I had deleting 'foobar' was related to the autologin setting as well?


gnome-shell-3.4.1-4.fc17.x86_64