Mageia forum

I have no idea what I did but I need Help to fix it back to the way it was before. I was changing some of Mageia boot options and settings, etc. Now when my machine boots up, the screen says "Welcome to locahost" Then I'm prompted to enter my login and password which I enter then the following message pops up in a box:

"Call to 1nusertemp failed (temporary directories full?). Check your installation."

The only option is to click okay, that screen goes away and it leaves me back at the "Welcome to localhost" login screen. I'm not very skilled and am trying to learn this Mage!a OS that my friend thought it would be a good idea to put on my laptop in place of my Windows 7. Now I'm stuck to learn this system and personalize it which has been quite interesting and has went smoothly...up to this point. Now I can't even get on my machine. I'm using another computer to make this post.

Also, if I try to restart the computer and hit F4, then I get a blue screen that says:

"Initialize....
Please plug in AC!!
System doesn't permit to flash BIOS !!, Please press Power Button to shutdown."

I have no idea what that means, and even if I do plug it in, I still get the same message. I just want to be able to use my computer again as if I had messed with the settings today. I'm actually a first year IT student so I'm trying to learn, but am completely stuck and am begging for someone to help me. Thanks!!

I guess the first thing to do is boot the system via a Live disc and then have a look at some log files. If Syslog was not installed in your Mandriva system (I can't remember if it is by default), you'd need to use a Live distro with journald to read the system log, with the command

journalctl -D <hard disk mount point>/var/log/journald

Otherwise just read the .log text files inside

<hard disk mount point>/var/log/

I just had that problem myself this morning. However, in my case it was because a virtual machine ran completely wild and totally trashed the volume that contains my /home. I wound up restoring the entire volume from backup. Very strange issue; I have never seen it happen before. Oh well...such is life, and since my backup procedures are comprehensive, it was just a thing.

Your problem is caused by one of two things: either (a) your /tmp directory is full - and this is a good chance because you said you were fooling around with boot settings - or (2) your KDE settings in your /home directory are screwed up.

My first guess is the problem is with /tmp. You said this is a laptop, which immediately suggests you don't have a lot of RAM. Now, I found out (to my surprise) that there is a setting in Mageia 3 that will cause /tmp to be mounted as a tmpfs in RAM - and if this happens, and you don't have enough RAM, BAD THINGS happen...sort of like the message you are getting...which is a BAD THING.

So, to check this, boot your machine until you get to the log-in screen. After you are at that screen, wait for a few seconds, then type ctrl-alt-F2. This will get you to a console window which will have a login prompt.

At that prompt, enter your user name, then your password. You now will have a command line on which you can enter commands.

At the command line, type the command "df" (without the quotes) and hit enter.

You will get a listing showing where various file systems are mounted. You are looking for /tmp, which might be listed in the right hand column of this listing (and it might not be too). If it is listed in the right-hand column, then follow that row to the left hand column to see what kind of device /tmp is. If the entry in the left hand column is tmpfs, then that is your problem and you need to move /tmp back to your hard drive. If /tmp is not listed or if it is not listed as being a tmpfs, then this is NOT your problem.

Now, if it turns out this is your problem and you need to move /tmp, then you need to know how to do that. Check https://forums.mageia.org/en/viewtopic.php?f=8&t=5616 for information about that. If that is enough for you, then you are good to go. If not, ask again and someone will help you.

The other possibility is that your KDE configuration is screwed up. What you do in this event depends considerably on how important your configuration is to you. If you are just setting up your system and don't have emails stored on it (particularly if you don't have emails stored on it) then you can just delete the entire .kde4 directory in your home directory and let the system recreate a default KDE configuration when you log in. If you want to save emails it gets a lot trickier.

I won't comment any further until you investigate a bit and can provide enough more information to steer things appropriately, but this will get you going.

So I followed your instructions and I believe that this is my problem, however I have no idea how to read all this and don't want to F it up further, so I below I will type what I see, then if you could tell me if this Is the problem, I will investigate how to move /tmp to the hard drive (or whatever it is that I need to do.) I appreciate your help.

Code: Select all

gpg-agent[1988]: can't create directory'/home/kari/.gnupg':  Permission denied
gpg-agent[1988]:  error creating '/home/kari/.gnupg/gpg-agent-info';  No such file or directory
gpg-agent[1989]:  gpg-agent (GnuPG) 2.0.19 started
-bash-4.2$ df
Filesystem     Size     Used   Avail    Use%  Mounted  on
rootfs            12G      5.1G   6.16    46%    /
devtmpfs       1.9G     0         1.9G   0       /dev
tmpfs            1.9G     0         1.9G   0       /dev/shm
tmpfs            1.9G     408K    1.9G   1%     /run
/dev/sdal      12G      5.1G    6.1G   46%    /
tmpfs            1.9G     0         1.9G   0%      /sys/fs/cgroup
none              1.9G    408K     1.9G   1%     /var/spool/postfix/run/saslauthd
-bash: history:  /home/kari/.bash_history:  cannot create:  Permission denied
-bash-4.2$

Now all that being said, I will tell you what I was attempting to when I accidentally made the mistake that I did in the boot settings which put me into this perdicament. I was trying to change the primary user name from snow to kari so I got into the user and groups and attempted to create duplicates of what was there but changing the name snow out with kari. obviously a very stupid mistake. anyways, thought this tidbit might be helpful.

Oh and PS, I do not need to save anything on this machine including emails.

kizzlesnizzle wrote: I was trying to change the primary user name from snow to kari so I got into the user and groups and attempted to create duplicates of what was there but changing the name snow out with kari. obviously a very stupid mistake.

Please next time either ask beforehand, or at least add such information what you did when posting your problem.

Well, that certainly changes things a bit.

Another common cause of that lnusrtemp error is a permissions problem, either in your /home directory or in /tmp.

In fact, I had that problem again this morning. Seems my VM goes wild theory might be wrong; I might have a hard drive acting up. So, today, I had to restore that drive again (and I removed it, and cleaned off the dust, and it passed all diagnostics... *sigh*), and I moved my /tmp off of that volume to another volume. When I moved it, I forgot to set write permissions on the new tmp directory on the other volume, and when I tried to log into an X session...guess what. Yep. lnusrtemp failed... Took me too long to figure it out (I'm short on sleep...that's my story, and I'm sticking with it! ), and I finally said "duh...", and checked permissions. Enabled write permissions for all users on /tmp, and problem went away.

Now, you have an obvious permissions problem; you are being told that "-bash: history: /home/kari/.bash_history: cannot create: Permission denied". This suggests that user kari (I presume it is user kari) does not own and/or does not have permission to write to user kari's home directory. This will certainly cause your problem since, at a minimum, the .Xauthority file and a couple of .dbus files can't get written.

So check and set your permissions, and you will probably be good to go.

Now, given the way you changed or added your user...not sure which...you may have duplicate userIDs (the system keeps track by numbers and attaches the associated name when showing it to you). In this case, the system will get confused. You can fix that manually, but it has been so long since I have had to do something like that I'm not sure I can tell you accurately how to do it. However, here are the key points:

In /etc/passwd, you will see entries of the form username:x:UserID:groupID:userID info:home directory:shell. The username must be unique and will show up in other places, such as in the group file if this user is a member of any groups other than his own group. The UserID is a number (for people who have home directories, by convention this number is greater than 500) and must be unique - and I will bet yours are not. The groupID is the ID of the primary group (described in /etc/group) that this user belongs to. The info field is optional and will be blank if no additional info is present. The home directory will typically be /home/username. The shell entry specifies the command line shell used with this user's login.

In the /etc/group file, you will see entries of the form groupname:x:groupID:members, where members may be blank. The username that matches the groupname is automatically a member of the group. Any other usernames that are members of that group will show in the members list. Both the groupname and the groupID must be unique, and I will bet you got this wrong. By convention, the group associated with a user (e.g. group kari for user kari) will have a groupno greater than 1000.

So fix up those things, and you probably will be OK.

For myself, I found a blob of dust in a location on my hard drive that possibly could cause intermittent problems (and I/O errors were being reported), so I blew that off and, since the drive passed diagnostics, maybe I, too am good to go.

I'm am totally frustrated. I don't know what to do to get this damn system to just work. I am not an IT person. Is there a way to just reinstall this software and start fresh?!?! Or is there someone that can chat with me to help me?

I know I'm just supposed to correct the user things but have NO IDEA where to start and don't want to mess it up any worse.

You said that you got into this trouble by manually editing the /etc/passwd and /etc/group files. Therefore you quite obviously DO know where to start.

It's your choice; do or do not. Doesn't matter to me.

Okay, well the thing is that I can't get logged in to the operating system to go back and fix the users and permissions. That leaves me with the whole can't get loggin in thing. If there was a way to get logged in then I could probably fix it....but not knowing how leaves me here.....

You don't need to login into this installation to fix those files. You can boot with live media and edit them. This is what ITA84 already suggested in first reply. Just in case I also have another (or several) parallel installation of linux.

That is how. About what exactly to change is unfortunately beyond me.

All I know is that every time I start up my machine it ends up on the screen that says "Welcome to localhost" and asks for a login. The problem is, I CAN'T login because of the message "Call to 1nusertemp failed (temporary directories full?). Check your installation."keeps popping and prevents me from doing ANYTHING. What Exactly am I supposed to do at this point? (To get in I mean and fix the user permissions which prompted this whole issue? Desperation.......

Did you ever try to boot of any live media?

If you don't have any live media you should get one or create one on another PC.

2 questions:

I have a live Mageia 3 disc but it doesn't open automatically. What's the command for that? Or is there another way I need to do it?

I also have a live Windows 7 on a USB (which is what I've wanted to reinstall all along then use Mageia as a dual system. How do I get the system to "autorun" the Windows 7 installation from the USB stick?

kizzlesnizzle wrote:I have a live Mageia 3 disc but it doesn't open automatically. What's the command for that? Or is there another way I need to do it?

There is no command. Many computers are setup that way to boot directly from hard drive and they skip the test for boot media in optical and USB devices. You need to change boot device order in BIOS to boot directly from such media. Many computers have some separate key combo for that. You can check the manual for your motherboard or do a web search on how to do it.

For second question the answer is the same. Just insert your boot media in your computer, switch it on or restart it, change the boot order if needed and there you go.