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I had upgraded ubuntu to 18.04 and now I have a very major problem on my laptop: I cannot login at all. The computer is a dell with ubuntu installed by the manufacter some years ago and the preceding upgrades went ok.

What happens is the following: The boot sequence goes ok until I reach the state of putting my password. The password is recognized but then nothing happens. The laptop is in a state of stasis and absolutely nothing happens for minutes on end.

There is no apparent possibility to change to another window manager that is less dangerous and so my laptop is not usable and if I do not find a way out my data are lost. What options are possible in that situation.

Mathieu Dutour Sikiric
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  • are you able to get a shell by pressing ctrl alt F2 or F3 (4,5,6...)? – Zanna May 08 '18 at 12:42
  • What exactly is on the screen when this happens? – Steve May 08 '18 at 12:44
  • Nothing shows up on the screen. Only pointer of the mouse which sometimes I can move and sometimes not. – Mathieu Dutour Sikiric May 08 '18 at 13:00
  • With "Ctrl alt F4" I could get a shell and copy my data which is major +. But the problem remains that graphical login is impossible. – Mathieu Dutour Sikiric May 08 '18 at 13:30
  • Sometimes (only 1 time so far) the login actually pass and I can work. Sometimes nothing appears for 5 minutes. Sometimes the login does not happen and I am throw back to the login screen. No predicable behavior. – Mathieu Dutour Sikiric May 08 '18 at 13:49
  • Perhaps you can try sudo apt install --reinstall your display manager - is it gdm or lightdm? – Zanna May 08 '18 at 14:57
  • So, I did the reinstall with "sudo apt install --reinstall gdm3" and it had no impact. When the login attempt fails, there should be a trace of this event happening. Somewhere we should have a log indicating that one program has crashed or something else has failed. Any idea where to find this kind of information? – Mathieu Dutour Sikiric May 09 '18 at 07:47
  • You may find such information in $HOME/.xsession-errors – Zanna May 09 '18 at 09:12
  • Thank you. The last line of the .xsession-errors is dbus-update-activation-environment: setting _=/usr/bin/dbus-update-activation-environment. Just after dbus-update-activation-environment: setting LC_TIME=hr_HR.UTF-8. So indeed the setting _ is suspect but I have no idea what cause the problem. – Mathieu Dutour Sikiric May 09 '18 at 10:50
  • hmm possible bug. You may consider reporting on Launchpad. Could there be a graphics card issue involved? Do you have the option of logging into Unity (sorry I'm not using GNOME and don't know what options the default login screen has on 18.04... option could be hidden in some kind of gear icon?) and if so does that work? – Zanna May 09 '18 at 13:30
  • Your comment leaves two possibilities: 1) That it is a graphic card issue and so irrespective of Gnome/Unity/KDE/LXDE/Whatever 2) That it is an environment problem, i.e. related to Gnome or unity. I would be happy to be able to use ANY environment that work but unfortunately while in previous version I could change at login the environment, now this is no longer possible and I do not know how to change that. – Mathieu Dutour Sikiric May 10 '18 at 06:52

2 Answers2

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I had this too.

I entered password but only got back to login screen. Luckily I had another account into which I could login. From there I could see that my main account was encrypted.

The fix was to do:

sudo apt install ecryptfs-utils
abu_bua
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user2071943
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Try this: (login to console ctrl + alt + f2)

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade
reboot
EdZ
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