On Sat, March 17, 2018 7:51 pm, Mark Galassi wrote:

Too much in this thread for me to have read it all, but I have handled these often.

The things to do from a virtual console are to

logged in as me, ubuntu@ubuntu then ran commands as below:

sudo apt /etc/init.d/lightdm stop sudo apt /etc/init.d/gdm3 stop

the 2 commands above stopped process & 2 below "command not found" apt isn't in the command so ran without it and dm commands worked

sudo apt /etc/init.d/kdm stop sudo apt /etc/init.d/xdm stop

and so on for any *dm. Then you try your startx. You can also try a restart on the less flakey display managers, like gdm3 ("sudo /etc/init.d/gdm3 restart")

gdm3 restart failed so ran- "$systemctl status gdm.service: Starting GNOME Display Manager.... gdm.service: Control process exited, code=exited status=1 Failed to start GNOME Display Manager gdm.service: Unit entered failed state gdm.service: Triggering ONFailure=dependencies gdm.service: Failed with result 'exit-code' gdm.service" Service hold-off time over, scheduling restart Stopped GNOME Display Manager gdm.service: Start request repeated too quickly Failed to start GNOME Display manager" "$sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm restart" This opened Graphical display as before but as ubuntuguest autologin and switching back to tty1 is me logged in as ubuntu. So I cannot switch from the graphical XFCE ubuntuguest to a vt as ubuntuguest. I cannot quit the GUI guest and a logout graphically just restarts the GUI. A GUI restart reboots the computer into a black screen with a throbbing "Kubuntu" that vanishes and screen goes grey with no GUI visible. Switching to tty1 and startx says X already running so stop lightdm and restart it. XFCE desktop opens as ubuntuguest (makes sense)

If you are experimenting with our GUI running you can run "startx -- :2" (or :3 or higher) to see what happens.

For this list attaching the full /var/log/Xorg.0.log might be useful

Virtually (!) impossible as I cannot copy the log to this machine from the goofy one and I cannot type it as it is thousands of lines

as well as transcripts of startx with different displays like :2 or :3.

On thing I'm not clear on is what really happens when you power on the computer.

See above Your original email (I was unable to follow all the

followups) does not make it clear if that first login you do is graphical or on a virtual text console.

If the former, then the whole rest of the message is strange because starting X from an alread-graphical situation is not the thing to try.

If that first login is on a virtual text console then your situation seems to be that you booted and it came up with vt1 instead of vt7, but at the same time automatically logged you in as guest on vt7. I have never seen that, and it smells of some weird mucking with user accounts. Make sure that guest is not set to automatically log in.

Among other problems with the precision of this problem report is that you don't mention what desktop is your default,

Was Gnome and now, no matter logged in as me or guest, is XFCE but only opens as guest and no graphical or text way to switch user.

and which one comes up when you go to vt7 and are logged in as guest.

XFCE Maybe it's in the many

later messages.