Login loop Fedora 19 GNOME 3

Question

I've just installed Fedora 19 in my hard drive which has some 100GB+ free space.

I'm not able to login to Fedora now. After entering the correct credentials, I got to see the console-like black screen with some text e.g. [OK] something ... then back to the login screen again. It is endless.

Note that I have definitely entered the correct password because when I didn't it showed me "authentication failed"

History: Everything went smoothly after installation. I installed Chrome and git. I set up Eclipse executable. I edited /etc/environment so as to able to run abd executable (I'm doing Android development)

I ran:

yum update

I also ran (according to this):

yum install glibc.i686 glibc-devel.i686 libstdc++.i686 zlib-devel.i686 ncurses-devel.i686 libX11-devel.i686 libXrender.i686 libXrandr.i686

My Fedora is 64 bit.

I have already reinstalled Fedora after this issue happened for the first time.

I also did the following: Press "E" when grub shows the kernel options (I'm dual-booting Fedora and Windows 7) Added "3" to the end of the linux ... line Press "F10" but nothing, even ls, works in such command line mode so no luck for me at all

Answer 1

I have found the cause of the problem and a workaround.

The cause of the problem is that I edited /etc/environment

At first, I foolishly put:
PATH="$PATH:...
which definitely doesn't work because we can't have variable in the plain-text file (it's not a script).

After that, I changed it to:
PATH=/home/ericnguyen/adt/sdk/platform-tools
still doesn't work I may have made a typo - wrong path For the experiment's sake, the directory /home/ericnguyen/adt/sdk/platform-tools is not even there yet - I skipped creating it to save time

Workaround:
My goal was to simply have the above directory included in PATH environment variables for all users for good.
Despite the popular answer from many sources on the Internet mentioning /etc/environment (which I have successfully used many times on my Centos servers and my Mac), /etc/profile, bash stuffs, I have learnt that best practice is to put a shell script inside /etc/profile.d/
e.g. env_path.sh
export PATH=${PATH}:/home/ericnguyen/adt/sdk/platform-tools

Benefits of this approach:

• Does what I need - apply PATH to all users forever
• It's a script so there's a lot of things I can do
• It's a script so it's easier to troubleshoot and is not as dangerous as modifying /etc/environment