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I am using a system76 computer. I have been running Ubuntu 20.04 for some time fine.

Last night I upgraded to 22.04 after I was prompted to do so.

But now when I try to log in, I can only do so into a bash shell. I can't get the windowing system to start from there. I have tried startx and other things that I have found on various sites where it seems others had a similar problem.

I tried chmod 755 /tmp /etc/tmp, I tried uninstalling and reinstalling Xorg, I tried deleting .Xauthority. All of which I found recommended in various places.

When I type startx from the bash shell prompt, I get the following error messages:

(EE)
Fatal server error:
(EE) Could not create lock file in /tmp/.tXO-lock
(EE)
(EE)
Please consult The X.Org Foundation support
    at http://wiki.x.org
 for help.
(EE)
xinit:  giving up
xinit:  unable to connect to X server:  Connection refused
xinit:  server error

Can anybody help me?

RedNyc
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2 Answers2

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First, it's unclear to me if you're being forced to login to a terminal session because X doesn't start automatically, or because it fails after your sign-in attempt.

Then, anyways, if you can afford it (meaning the net is working fine, and you don't have any special configuration you would like to preserve --although you can always backup your entire home and etc directories, and you should before a major upgrade) instead of trying to fix individual packages, I would suggest trying to purge and reinstall all of ubuntu-desktop at once (in the past I would try to avoid this only because network bandwidth was expensive).

Simón
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0

I couldn't figure out at first how to back up my stuff in my home directory, so I was super reluctant to just try a new install and just have the drive wiped. I should have backed all my stuff up ahead of doing the upgrade, but I foolishly thought that since it was just an upgrade, there wouldn't be a problem.

Eventually, I was able through the bash login to mount an external drive and back up my home directory stuff. Then on another computer I created a Ubuntu 22.04 installation USB drive. From there on, everything worked like a charm.

Why did all this happen? My guess is that something went wrong with the mechanism that makes an idle machine lock a user out after a while (so that you have to login again).

I guess that because when I woke up the next morning after I left the upgrade process running, the screen was locked and no matter what I did I couldn't log in through the graphical interface, but I had to go to tty4 (or, I probably could have gone to any other of those tty-s, but I only learned about that, as I wrote above, when I studied posts online from other people who had a problem similar to mine, and from the kind people who tried to help those people out).

Anyway, it all worked like a charm once I simply did a fresh install (after backing all my stuff up). I got the idea from Simon, above, so THANK YOU SIMON!!! :)

RedNyc
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