Unable to login after upgrade

[Liam Proven]

On Fri, 30 Oct 2020 at 10:13, Gregory Gamble <greg.gamble at uwa.edu.au> wrote:
>
> Dear list,
>
> I wonder if you have advice on what to check out.
>
> On my "work" computer, I recently did the upgrade from 18.04 to 20.04
> and now have the curious situation of not being able to login at the desktop,
> but I'm able to remote login from home.
>
> So far the IT guy has not been able to locate the problem.
> Have you some ideas on where to look and what info. I should provide
> ... might the GRUB file have been over written?

No. It is booting fine, from what you describe.

As someone else has said, when you log in, the desktop immediately
crashes, so you just go back to the login prompt.

>      If so, will a sudo command fix it?

It's a bit hard to say until we know what's happening!

I mean, probably, yes, but which one?

First things first. Forget all this mucking about with external keyboards.

Just press Ctrl+Alt+F2 (or F3...F6) at the login screen, and try to
log in on the text console.

If it works, and it probably will, you can do an update from there:

sudo -s
apt update
apt full-upgrade -y
apt autoremove -y
apt clean

This will clear out a lot of leftovers from the system upgrade and
probably free up a couple of gigs of disk space. Your problem could
conceivably be as simple as a full disk.

>From here, you can reboot with Ctrl+Alt+Del.

But more importantly, once you can log in on the console, you can look
at log files and work out why the desktop is crashing.

-- 
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