I created a non-root user, new_user, on a Red Hat Linux machine. I then logged in as new_user and created a private/public key pair.
I've created /home/new_user/.ssh, and I've appended the public key to the authorized_keys file, but I'm not able to log in using the key pair. For instance, if I execute the command
ssh -i /home/new_user/privatekey new_user@localhost
I get prompted for a password.