Lightdm displays running in low resolution box upon booting

[Steve Kemsley]

Upon booting or rebooting the lightdm greeter displays a box that says the screen is running in low resolution mode and offers to allow you to reconfigure graphics.

if you CTRL-ALT-F1 and login then "sudo killall xinit" followed by "service lightdm start" the normal login screen is then displayed.

The low resolution issue does not always happen as most of the time it goes to the normal login box, but it has periods where is happens frequently / all the time.

Looks like a timing issue when booting (possibly) We are running 64GB SSD's so booting is quite rapid.

12.04 Ubuntu AMD64
Intel i5 2400 4GB ram

[Ubuntu Foundations Team Bug Bot (crichton)]

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[Steve Kemsley (steve-kemsley)]

I have fixed this by adding a sleep 10 to the upstart script that starts X11 its here : /etc/rcS.d/S70x11-common so far the GUI comes up every time will monitor further, currently testing on 20+ systems.

[Launchpad Janitor (janitor)]

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

[Elven Decker (sailing)]

I'm running 12.04 and cannot use lightdm because of this issue. I always get the low resolution mode message and often can't get beyond it because the keyboard/mouse appear to be locked. I use gdm as a workaround.

[Elven Decker (sailing)]

I am running an AMD Athlon(tm) XP 2200+ with an nvidia nv11 x86/MMX+/3DNow!+/SSE card. I don't believe my problem is related to fast booting. :) I also tried to tuck a 10 second delay in S70x11-common with no success.

Also, instead of using "service lightdm start", I was able to start a session using startx directly from the command prompt after killing xinit.

That being said, lightdm is a lot snappier than gdm! Thanks, I'm looking forward to a smoother startup.