Quantal Beta 1 fresh install : No lightdm graphical login

[Swâmi Petaramesh]

After a fresh install of Quantal Beta 1, I notice the following behaviour on a machine with ATI RS482 [Radeon Xpress 200M] :

- Booting in black : no plymouth graphical, nor text.

- A "graphical" mouse cursor shortly shows up, then disappears / the system then sits there on a "text" screen showing a couple diag lines corresponding to the boot process (but unrelated to login or X or lightdm... probably just some of the latest boot text messages, i.e."ACPI Battery blah-blah..")

- [Alt]-[Ctrl]-[F1] brings a text console with proper login capability

# sudo lightdm start ... starts lightdm and GUI properly, allowing graphical boot into Unity

....Next reboot gives the same absence of "spontaneous" lightdm startup...

=> Applying all latest updates as of 2012/09/21 brings no improvement on this respect.

ProblemType: Bug
DistroRelease: Ubuntu 12.10
Package: lightdm 1.3.3-0ubuntu4
ProcVersionSignature: Ubuntu 3.5.0-15.22-generic 3.5.4
Uname: Linux 3.5.0-15-generic x86_64
ApportVersion: 2.5.2-0ubuntu4
Architecture: amd64
Date: Fri Sep 21 17:16:54 2012
InstallationMedia: Ubuntu 12.10 "Quantal Quetzal" - Alpha amd64 (20120905.2)
ProcEnviron:
 TERM=xterm
 PATH=(custom, no user)
 LANG=fr_FR.UTF-8
 SHELL=/bin/bash
SourcePackage: lightdm
UpgradeStatus: No upgrade log present (probably fresh install)

[Philipp Ebbecke (p-ebbecke)]

I just upgraded to 12.10 with my Lenovo T400 and I had to start lightdm manually to boot to Unity. Since this Laptop uses an HD3xxx ATI Card, I don't know if this is fglrx related.

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

Mine is ATI too, but not using fglrx (too old a graphics card, unsupported by new fglrx) so it uses basic free ATI drivers.

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

I will add that on my machine *most of the times* lightdm doesn't start by itself, but *sometimes* it does...

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

This bug is still around at Quantal final freeze... I see it on 5 (!) different machines : randomly, but often, the system boots but the GUI doesn't start, I need to "sudo start ligthdm" from a text console... A showstopper for Linux beginners...

[Swâmi Petaramesh (swami-petaramesh)]

I see the bug on 3 machines with (different) Nvidia cards, one machine with ATI, one machine with Intel. That does not seem to be related to any specific graphics card...

[Jonathan Ernst (jonathan.ernst)]

Same here on a thinkpad T400S.

I've tried upgrading the kernel to 3.6.3 and the graphical drivers with xorg-edgers version to no avail.

Until this bug is fixed I added 'respawn' to the lightdm upstart script so that it respawns until it works (sometime it works the first time, sometimes the second time and sometimes more restarts are needed).

[Robert Ancell (robert-ancell)]

12.10 is end of life.