gdm fails to start

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre]

GDM fails to start, and I am blocked in a half-booted system with no getty, no ssh, blank screen.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 17.04
Package: gdm3 3.24.0-0ubuntu1
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 4.10.0-13.15-generic 4.10.1
Uname: Linux 4.10.0-13-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.20.4-0ubuntu2
Architecture: amd64
CurrentDesktop: GNOME
Date: Fri Mar 24 17:23:11 2017
InstallationDate: Installed on 2016-11-08 (136 days ago)
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 17.04 "Zesty Zapus" - Alpha amd64 (20161108)
SourcePackage: gdm3
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Including syslog, which contains some relevant gdm3 lines.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

Status changed to 'Confirmed' because the bug affects multiple users.

[Dean Henrichsmeyer (dean)]

I had the exact same behavior. My machine was originally a xenial install upgrade to yakkety and then zesty (installing and enabling gdm).

[Dean Henrichsmeyer (dean)]

Here's lspci output of the machine in question which is a Lenovo X1 Gen2.

[Dean Henrichsmeyer (dean)]

FYI, I see this on a fresh install of zesty in which I just apt-get install gnome-shell.

[Chris Rainey (ckrzen)]

I had this same problem and it was fixed by:

$ sudo apt-get install gnome-session-wayland

[Jeremy Bícha (jbicha)]

Mathieu, I strongly suspect that this bug is a duplicate of LP: #1686257 which was fixed in Ubuntu 16.04 LTS and up in the past week. Could you check if GDM works for you now?

I apologize that this bug took so long to identify and fix. The Ubuntu GNOME team obviously had not been testing a very minimal gnome-shell install during the past year.

[Mathieu Trudel-Lapierre (cyphermox)]

Indeed sounds like the issue I was having -- marking as a duplicate.

FTR, I no longer see an issue with gdm3; but I had reinstalled my system with Ubuntu-GNOME directly, and in that case it worked; so it was indeed due to some issue with what is different between Ubuntu and Ubuntu-GNOME.