Re: [LUG] Mint 19.x Login Weirdness

[mr meowski <mr.meowski@xxxxxxxx>]

On 13/11/2019 14:40, Julian Hall wrote:
> 
> I /think/ I know what the problem is now. I loaded Mint 19.2 to the 
> password prompt, dropped to a shell and tried 'sudo startx'. That 
> complained it couldn't start and among other things mentioned 'low 
> diskspace?' so I loaded Mint 17.3 and mounted /dev/sda1 - an SSD which 
> only has / for Linux Mint 19.2 installed on it - into /media/julian/TEMP 
> and had a look around. That claims there is only 8Gb free of around 
> 130Gb, but I can only get about 20Gb of readable files. /root and 
> Lost&Found are both unreadable but it seems the suspect additional 
> content is in one of those two. Any suggestions how to identify which 
> and clear out the - probably - extraneous rubbish?


Ah still a problem I see... "sudo startx" is definitely not going to 
work out for you for various reasons but let's not get into that or the 
space issue which are both false starts.

The trick is to persuade your system to cough up specific information on 
exactly _what_ it thinks is wrong which is sometimes surprisingly 
difficult. Xorg/Xwayland issues aren't captured in journald quite the 
way you might necessarily expect and that seems to be your issue here as 
a console login works just fine.

I'd do a clean reboot, login over SSH from a working machine (makes it 
easier to copy/paste stuff from if required) and do some more recon. At 
the login screen check first to see what type of session you're using by 
default - there are properly different options to login using Xorg or 
Xwayland, quite probably not clearly labelled as such. Try both. You may 
have a simpler WM installed which will work when complex WMs like Gnome 
or KDE might choke on a failed dependency somwhere - like Awesome or i3 
for example. If not, don't worry about it for now.

See what the following have to say for themselves once you've rebooted 
and tried a couple of graphical logins:

systemctl --failed
sudo journalctl -p err -b
dmesg

You can also try running "sudo journalctl -b -f" in a console and then 
trying to login graphically which will tail journalctl in realtime and 
show you what is happening.

I suspect you _still_ won't see what the root cause is though and my 
suspicion is that Xorg is dying in some weird way probably due yet again 
to kernel mode setting and driver misconfiguration.

Can we just check the system is fully up to date and what kernel are you 
using?


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