This post isn't the security post i'd promised - that will be this coming week. No, this issue is Ubuntu 14.04 LTS - again. It seems that every step Ubuntu takes forward, it takes several back. At the time of writing, the Ubuntu forums are filled with people having sound issues and graphics issues. I daren't check the networking forum, because I know how many wi-fi issues I was having with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS last week.
Today's issue was different. Ubuntu 14.04 LTS booted up to a black screen. At first, I pressed my brightness function key, because HP laptops are known for booting with low brightness, but that didn't fix it. At this point, I began to panic a little bit, because I knew I was looking at a possible re-install of Ubuntu.
I dropped to a shell and ran 'ls' which showed my files were all there, 'cat' showed that they were still in tact. This seemed to be a driver issue. Now, I hadn't done any fiddling with drivers, so there's absolutely no reason this should have happened. I looked around on the web and people were talking about re-installations until I found one guy who said he dropped into command line and removed lightdm and installed gdm.
Before I tell you how to do that, what is lightdm? "Lightdm is the most user visible aspect of the display manager is the login screen, however it also manages the X servers and facilitates remote logins using the XDMCP protocol. It was added as default display manager display manager in Ubuntu 11.10 (Oneric) replacing GDM which has been the display manager since the beginning." (Source - Wiki Ubuntu).
So essentially, GDM was replaced by lightdm. I followed the guys suggestions:
- Boot into recovery mode (or you can actually just hit ctrl + alt + f1 to drop into a shell from your black screen, which is what I did)
- type in: sudo apt-get remove lightdm
- sudo apt-get install gdm
- sudo shutdown -r 0
Your machine should now boot up with a different (and imho, better) login screen. You should now be able to login without seeing a black screen. I know what you're thinking: wouldn't it be better to boot into recovery, un-install lightdm....and re-install it? Yes - it probably would. But this is what was suggested and this is what worked for me.
Hope it helps someone out there.
This works for me:
ReplyDeletesudo apt-get remove lightdm
sudo apt-get install lightdm
sudo shutdown -r 0
Thanks a lot!
Simon McCabe, thank you for posting this. Got me out of my 3 day agony of black screens in 14.04.2. With an old Nvidia card, GEforce 7300 LE, none of the driver oriented fixes worked for me. And none of the lightdm fixes did, either.
ReplyDeleteGlad it worked! Thanks for the comment. It's good to know that these posts help people out.
ReplyDeleteit is not working for me
ReplyDelete