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Why does the Ubuntu login screen very occasionally show?

us flag

I have a machine set up to run in a sort of kiosk mode, with an application set to start automatically on startup, and with no login required. It's a Jetson TX2 running Ubuntu 14.04 on an ARM chip. Normally it works fine. But very, VERY occasionally, the machine will boot up to the Ubuntu login screen, asking for the default user's password. Once you enter the password the application will start as expected. You can also power cycle the machine and it will start correctly upon the next boot.

It probably only does this once or twice every one hundred boots. It's a customer-facing machine, though, so asking a customer to enter a password or reboot isn't really an option. It happens so rarely I'm not even sure how to troubleshoot or determine what's different about those particular boot sequences. Can anyone point me in the right direction - either troubleshooting or what setting to check/change to make sure it never happens?

us flag
Please edit and mention the version of Ubuntu you are using. As a workaround, you can remove sudo access from the default user, and write down the password on a sticker in the kiosk.
user535733 avatar
cn flag
If you can catch one of the very occasional occurrences, the logs might be informative.
us flag
@ArchismanPanigrahi - I added version and CPU info.
us flag
@user535733 - can you tell me which logs? Should I just look at dmesg? (It just happened on Friday, so I might have some luck.
user535733 avatar
cn flag
I would start with plain old /var/log/syslog. Syslog rotates daily, so poke around in the /var/log directory until you find the correct day's syslog.
user535733 avatar
cn flag
Uh-oh. Ubuntu 14.04 is seven years old, and is past End of Community Support. So we do not answer questions about it anymore. There have been enormous changes since 14.04, so newer answers related to systemd and gdm might be incorrect for your use. A real kiosk mode is available in newer releases of Ubuntu.
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