I was unable to login to Elementary today. Every time I entered in my password it just flashed and nothing would happen. I was able to use guest which was good because I had a more important matter to attend to and I needed SSH access. Not sure what happened but I found people with similar issues at this thread right on the elementary.org site. I’ve actually come across this issue with ubuntu and lubuntu in the past. The very easiest thing to do is to hit CTRL-ALT-F1 which takes you to a terminal screen where you can enter your username and password.
Once you have logged in you have a few choices to try and fix the problem.
- type sudo rm /home/username/.Xauthority and then reboot
- OR sudo apt-get install pantheon-xsession-settings and then reboot
My issue was 2-fold. I did a an update and upgrade and it upgraded pantheon. I wasn’t missing the package like one of the other posters. However, after rebooting it still didn’t work. I then proceeded to delete .Xauthority and rebooted. Now I have a functional Freya Elementary OS.
Like I mentioned before I have ran into this issue before and it was not an easy fix. I think it had something to do with lightdm and my nvidia display drivers.