System hangs during boot with "Checking battery state" on screen

[Iain Farrell]

After some digging it appears that lightdm isn't starting properly. One fix appears to be Ctrl+Alt+F1,user and password and startx but I fixed it by switching to using GDM - sudo dpkg-reconfigure -plow gdm.

This happened after I ran updates on Wednesday of this week.

[novatillasku (novatillasku)]

Yes, has happened to me as well.I switching to GDM.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

You might check if lightdm-gtk-greeter is installed. Installing manually fixed it for me.

[Bryce Harrington (bryce)]

(I'm guessing lightdm-gtk-greeter needs added as a dependency of something or added to the desktop seed.)

[Iain Farrell (iain-farrell)]

I already have lightdm-gtk-greeter installed so I don't think it's that. Could uninstall and reinstall to see what happens ... Anything else I can do to help debug this?

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

I have this problem with ubuntu natty since the -10 kernel update.

Ubuntu boots ok with 2.6.38-9 but not with -10

[Iain Farrell (iain-farrell)]

Interestingly I also see this error when I just saved my settings to switch back from LightDM to GDM - was seeing if this had been fixed or not. I choose GDM, save my choice and get these errors in the terminal.

dpkg-maintscript-helper: warning: environment variable DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_NAME missing
dpkg-maintscript-helper: warning: environment variable DPKG_MAINTSCRIPT_PACKAGE missing

[Jeff Lane  (bladernr)]

FWIW, I saw this problem after updating an older Alpha install a while back. I just got tired of messing with it and did a fresh install of Oneiric using the latest daily-live and X (or lightDM if that's the real culprit) launches and everything is happy again.

[Lukasz Olszewski (olszewskil)]

Iain, please verify if the following solves this for you: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bug/804171/comments/21

Thanks!

[magelan (magelan)]

I have the same bug, only the downgrade to the previous lightdm version (1.0.6-0ubuntu1.1) in synaptic helped.
This didn't:
-install lightdm-gtk-greeter
-check whether unity-greeter was installed (it was)
-sudo aticonfig --initial --force
-sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
-sudo rm -r /var/run/dbus; dbus-daemon --system

[Alwin Roosen (info-alwinroosen)]

Same issue for me after fresh install of 11.10 64bit.

I only have this issue on an Asrock H61M/U3S3 Motherboard with onboard Intel graphics (if this matters), other desktops/laptops with nvidia or ati seem to work fine.

The strange thing is that it sometimes does work correctly, I'd say 3/4 times it fails to show the login screen.

It stops at "Checking battery state"

CTRL-ALT-F1, logging in and running "sudo /etc/init.d/lightdm restart" works every time, but is very annoying to say the least.

What I have tried so far:

- install lightdm-gtk-greeter (was not installed)
- install unity-greeter (was already installed)
- sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm (same errors as in comment 6)
- sudo rm -r /var/run/dbus; dbus-daemon --system
- removing the ~/.Xauthority file
- reinstalling/replacing nvidia drivers is no option since this is intel, but it is suggested many times

I did check some logs, but am not sure where to look and if this is related:

- /var/log/lightdm/lightdm.log - Stopping X local seat, failed to start a display
- /var/log/lightdm/x-0-greeter.log - WARNING: unity-greeter: Fatal IO error 11 on X server :0.
- /var/log/Xorg.0.log - No screens found

Looked up the intel graphics specs:

lspci | grep VGA

00:02.0 VGA compatible controller: Intel Corporation 2nd Generation Core Processor Family Integrated Graphics Controller (rev 09)

I would like to see this solved, so if anyone needs more information, just let me know and I will do my best to gather it for you.

[Noel Shelton (noel-noelshelton)]

This also affects me after upgrading to 3.0.0-13 this morning on a Dell Dimension 9200 w/ 2GB RAM running AMD64. This is too much of a "production machine" to spend a lot of time playing with it. I can confirm that manually restarting lightldm works. I have reverted back to 3.0.0-12 for the time being.

[magelan (magelan)]

The previous lightdm version (1.0.6-0ubuntu1.1) does not work any more for me, after some successful days. I do not know why. Gdm works since the second restart after reconfiguring.

[Robert Roth (evfool)]

This seems to be a duplicate of bug #824140.

[Fernando Luiz Chaves (xg-fergfndo-ci)]

This is happening with me since Ubuntu 12.10 Alpha 1 on VMWare Workstation 8.
At this time, Ubuntu 12.10 Beta 2 the problem persists.

[Mélodie (meets)]

Hi,

It just happened to me in a custom version of **Ubuntu 12.04**, which has been working fine for months. After several hours seeking for fixes on the forums, and eliminating one after one a few warnings and error messages I finally had only one message left on the screen before the boot stalls:
"stopping system v runlevel compatibility checking battery state".

Having tried to switch to gdm worked but I could not be satisfied with this solution because in a pure Openbox Ubuntu setup I could not find one good method to setup a background for gdm. :)

I can't say how many things I tried, boot after boot into the recovery boot and selecting the root console to install/uninstall/reinstall, change kernel... reboot again to see some progress... but still no lightdm login screen, no boot to X!

The fix has been reverting from
liblightdm-gobject-1-0 (1.2.3-0ubuntu2.3) and lightdm (1.2.3-0ubuntu2.3) to their former versions by recreating both packages with the help of the dpkg-repack tool, in another install of mine where I had not yet updated (the command as root is very simple : "dpkg-repack <package_name>"), and do:

sudo dpkg -i liblightdm-gobject-1-0_1.2.3-0ubuntu2.2_i386.deb lightdm_1.2.3-0ubuntu2.2_i386.deb

I put the packages here to have them always at hand in the following days:
http://meets.free.fr/Downloads/BentoVillageProject/Paquets-dpkg-repack

I hope this regression will be fixed soon!

Regards,
Mélodie

[Mélodie (meets)]

PS: forgot to say I was able to get to a tty by pressing Alt+Ctrl+F1 and login from there. I could start my session with startx, but if I wanted to start lightdm from the tty it was just looking like it was started but nothing happened, just ended on the first screen of the unfinished boot, and coming back to tty1 then trying to "stop" lightdm or kill the pid that the "service lightdm start" command had returned as output, resulted in a message showing that lightdm had not been started at all.

[Mélodie (meets)]

Hi,

This bug was never closed: after a few days I had reverted to the current kernel and updated, then it was fixed. I suggest to close this one bug. (enough with old bugs long solved. :) )

Regards,
Mélodie

[Gianfranco Costamagna (costamagnagianfranco)]

I remember at some point this bug was fixed for me too.

so closing as fix released even if I don't have a commit id :-)