Ownership of .Xauthority transferred to root
Almost certainly not, no. You either started an X session as root (not sure how you managed that) or simply used touch
or otherwise wrote .Xauthority
with sudo
. For more details, you'd have to explain what you were actually doing.
Next time, don't reinstall anything, just delete the ~/.Xauthority
file, it will be recreated automatically next time you log in:
sudo rm ~/.Xauthority
Then log in normally.
It happened to me too. I think that it could be caused by running
sudo graphic_application
instead of
gksudo graphic_application
for some (unknown) app. There is a paragraph in the sudo help page about that... scroll down to "Graphical sudo".
See also What is the difference between "gksudo nautilus" and "sudo nautilus"?