Ubuntu 22.10 GNOME never starts: boot screen ends with "[ OK ] Started GNOME Display Manager."

Andrew Arnott

12/23/23, 5:53 AM

GNOME was starting fine on this relatively new PC.

Lenovo ThinkCenter M910Q tiny desktop computer
Intel Core i7-6700T Up to 3.6GHz
32GB RAM
1TB NVMe SSD

Rebooting was fine too, although it hadn't had to do so for a few days. Today, I installed a few apps from the Ubuntu Software app, including GIMP and a couple other paint programs. I also let it install updates (only a few were offered today). When I rebooted, GNOME wouldn't come up anymore. I see a bunch of startup messages, ending with:

[  OK  ] Started GNOME Display Manager.

And that's the last message. Switching to another terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F2 and typing dmesg doesn't yield any relevant looking errors. I've never switched the hardware in this mini PC. I never intentionally changed drivers either.

I see this problem posted a lot, and many of them talk about video cards and drivers. I don't think this applies to my case since I didn't mess with any of those and it was working until tonight. Can anyone either suggest a solution or a means to collect more information that would help me to diagnose the problem?

I have apt update ; apt upgrade from another terminal, and even apt dist-upgrade and apt autoremove and apt --fix-problems install. Nothing solved the problem.

478

1 + 4

gnome

display-manager

Magnus

12/26/23, 8:21 PM

I don't have any solution. But this just happened to me today as well on 22.10 on an Intel NUC. No (intentional) updated drivers. I just installed a bunch of apps via Snap; Android Studio, Spotify, Discord, Jetbrains Rider. And now Ubuntu hangs at the same spot as you after a reboot.

Andrew Arnott

12/27/23, 12:18 AM

I reformatted to get unblocked. This time I chose ZFS for my file system. I installed `zfs-auto-snapshot` which takes hourly, daily, weekly and monthly snapshots so that if this ever happens again, I can trivially rollback whatever broke it without reformatting.

Andrew Arnott

12/27/23, 3:02 AM

It happened again, and right after using Trezor and Monero GUI for the first time -- just like when it happened last time. Using ZFS to rollback to an earlier snapshot fixed it. I'll now begin the process of isolating exactly what change breaks it.

Andrew Arnott

12/27/23, 3:56 AM

Unfortunately the rollback appears to have permanently horked docker, which had two running containers at the time the snapshot was taken. Docker now cannot recognize when containers are running or not, and cannot start any new ones.

Score:0

Ubuntu

Cr0w

2/24/24, 1:33 PM

This happend to me to. In the hanged boot screen, press ctrl+alt+f2 to open a new terminal and login. Then do 'sudo apt install --reinstall gnome-session' and then reboot.

+ 0

Elon Musk

I sit in a Tesla and translated this thread with Ai:

EN: Ubuntu 22.10 GNOME never starts: boot screen ends with "[ OK ] Started GNOME Display Manager."

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