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Every time I boot my PC Ubuntu keeps dropping me to TTY 1 where I have to log in and then do 

sudo lightdm start

just to log in again, which is very annoying

I have already tried removing and re-adding it to update-rc.d

update-rc.d lightdm defaults

but it just does not work. Anyone got an idea which logfiles to check or what to do get it working again?

I use Mint 12 with Gnome3.

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2
  • A couple questions, so I can help. Does it flicker before you drop to console? Is it correct when you start it manually?
    – J. M. Becker
    Commented Mar 12, 2012 at 19:56
  • yes it works fine when I start manually and it does flicker for a while (stops a checking battery state and then drops me to TTY 1)
    – Christian Smorra
    Commented Mar 13, 2012 at 12:03

3 Answers 3

Reset to default
1

You can always reconfigure lightdm and check settings or loads defaults, like this:

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

EDIT

If you don't have trouble to start lightdm manually, maybe there is a problem with your PATH on boot.

Check content of file /etc/X11/default-display-manager. If only entry is lightdm, change this to /usr/sbin/lightdm.

sudo echo "/usr/sbin/lightdm" > /etc/X11/default-display-manager
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  • unfortunately I get an error dpkg-maintscript-helper: warning: environment variable DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_NAME missing dpkg-maintscript-helper: warning: environment variable DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE missing
    – Christian Smorra
    Commented Mar 13, 2012 at 12:02
  • To resolve this, you can try to reinstall lightdm: sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get install lightdm
    – mindc
    Commented Mar 13, 2012 at 12:34
  • 1
    I reinstalled lightdm already and "/usr/sbin/lightdm" is my display manager
    – Christian Smorra
    Commented Mar 13, 2012 at 15:29
  • 2
    By the way, sudo echo foo > bar fails. Only echo will have sudo permissions while the shell doesn't, and its the shell that will open bar for writing. Try echo foo|sudo tee bar >/dev/null instead.
    – Patrick
    Commented Mar 17, 2012 at 20:07
0

This is how I fixed this problem:

first you need to stop lightdm if it's running

sudo service lightdm stop

then you need to x server to create a fresh xorg.conf, I did this by renaming my old one

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.old

then I deleted my current drivers

sudo aptitude remove --purge nvidia-current

IMPORTANT if you had or have drivers from the Nvidia site then you need to uninstall them as well. That means you will have to download them again if you dont have the .run file anymore and then do

[nvidia-installer] --uninstall

where nvidia-installer is the installer you just downloaded.

then you properly install the current drivers

sudo aptitude install nvidia-current

the next step would be to type

startx

and hope for Gnome2 (or the default window manager of your distribution) to come up which worked for me. The reason for this error seemed to be some kind of conflict with X11 and the Nvidia drivers. While on boot time I got the error that the Nvidia Kernel module could not be loaded, I still was able to start lightdm once I was in TTY1.

The cause for this might have been that I previously had the 290 version of the Nvidia drivers installed and then downgraded to nvidia-current (280) via aptitude which might caused some leftovers to remain and conflict with the older drivers (290 vs 280).

Note that you will have to reconfigure your desktop environment after applying these steps.

If you don't get a graphics accelerated UI (ie Gnome3, Unity 3D) run

sudo nvidia-xconfig

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You have to run sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target because if multi-user.target is set as default you can not use the GUI.

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