Linux boots to terminal

How to start Ubuntu in Console mode

I want to know if there is a way to switch to console mode from the boot menu. I have an NVIDIA 1070 and every time there is an update, the GUI stops working. All I need to do is re-install the drivers; however, to do that I need to be in console mode. EDIT: I should have added more information to this question but I’ll comment on all answers. In short: I’ve tried text instead of quiet splash I do see booting activity in text mode; however, I don’t get a login screen and ctrl + Alt + F1 doesn’t help because GDM keeps trying to restart. Previously I managed to kill GDM through multiple tries but is not working since the latest update. EDIT: After searching for runlevel, I’ve found How do I change the runlevel on systemd? but I think it required me to have a running system to make changes — please correct me if I’m wrong.

Amazing thanks a lot, this is what I was looking for. I would like to know if I can somehow make NVidia (proprietary) drivers configure properly with every kernel update. But even if not this should help me. You can add it as an answer and I’ll accept it.

4 Answers 4

Yes you can. As described here (ubuntuhandbook.org — Boot into text console ubuntu) you need to edit /etc/default/grub to have the next boot end up in text mode. In summary you will set these parameters:

GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT="text" GRUB_TERMINAL=console 

After saving changes you need to run:

sudo update-grub sudo systemctl enable multi-user.target --force sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target 

Undoing text-mode

To undo sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target simply type

sudo systemctl enable graphical.target --force sudo systemctl set-default graphical.target 

Is there any way to show login to terminal by default (like init 3 in old times), problem with ctrl+alt+f1 is that GDM keeps retrying to start and I don’t get console.

This does not seem to work on Ubuntu 15.04 and up (I tried 16.04 LTS). A crucial step after you fixed the grub file and run update-grub is to execute: sudo systemctl set-default multi-user.target — only then it started booting straight into console for me. Solution from @yury in the comments of the link you gave.

The undo part is not working on Ubuntu 18.04 and I’d also love to know how to revert this change properly so I don’t have to type startx on every boot. Thanks in advance!

Boot into recovery mode

Immediately after the motherboard / computer manufacturer logo splash screen appears when the computer is booting, with BIOS, quickly press and hold the Shift key, which will bring up a GNU GRUB menu screen. With UEFI press (perhaps several times) the Esc key to get to the GNU GRUB menu screen. Sometimes the manufacturer’s splash screen is a part of the Windows bootloader, so when you power up the machine it goes straight to the GNU GRUB menu screen, and then pressing Shift is unnecessary.

The timing when to press the left Shift key can be tricky, so sometimes if you miss it you need to try it again. If that doesn’t work try the answers to I can’t get the GRUB menu to show up during boot.

You will see a GNU GRUB menu screen that looks like this. Select Advanced options for Ubuntu and press Enter .

A new purple screen will appear showing a list of kernels, which includes options of booting the kernels normally or in recovery mode.

Press the down arrow key until you select the 2nd entry from the top (the one with the recovery mode in the description) and then press Enter twice.

Now you should see this recovery menu:

Using the arrow keys scroll down to network (the third entry from the bottom in the Recovery Menu) and then press Enter .

Using the arrow keys scroll down to root (the second entry from the bottom in the Recovery Menu) and then press Enter .

You should now see a root prompt and you can run commands from it.

lightdm is called lightdm because it is a lightweight application compared to GDM which is heavy and takes longer to load. If you still have lightdm installed you can switch back to using lightdm as the default login display manager with the command: dpkg-reconfigure gdm3 . This will open up a new window allowing you to select either gdm3 or lightdm as the default login display manager.

Reboot the computer with the command reboot

After that the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + F3 may start to work properly, and allow you to start Ubuntu from the console.

Start Ubuntu from a virtual console

1. Open a text-only virtual console by using the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + F3 .
2. At the login: prompt type your username and press Enter .
3. At the Password: prompt type your user password and press Enter .
4. Now you are logged in to a text-only console, and you can run terminal commands from the console. To reboot the system run the command: sudo reboot . Press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + F7 to exit the virtual console. In Ubuntu 17.10 and later press the keyboard shortcut Ctrl + Alt + F2 to exit from the virtual console. After you have logged in in the terminal type sudo systemctl start graphical.target and press Enter to bring up your default login screen, and then login to your Ubuntu desktop environment as usual.

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Thread: Computer boots to terminal instead of GUI

Spilled the Beans

Computer boots to terminal instead of GUI

I just did a clean install of 32-bit LXLE 12.04.5 from the live DVD onto my wife’s old computer. It’s an eMachines D3415 with an AMD Sempron 3400+ processor, 1.5GB RAM, an NVIDIA GeForce 6100 graphics adapter, and a 160GB HDD.

The system booted and ran well from the DVD and displayed a graphical user interface. However, when I boot from the HDD the entire screen is a terminal window.

I need to know what I did wrong and how to fix it as she’s not going to want to work from the Linux command line (nor am I).

Thanks in advance for any help and please ask if you need any more information about the old computer.

Ubuntu Member

Join Date Jul 2010 Location ozarks, Arkansas, USA Beans 14,049 —> Beans 14,049 Distro Xubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

Re: Computer boots to terminal instead of GUI

thomas58; Hi ! Welcome to the forum.

A better description of what you are booting to ?
Maybe a black screen with only a cursor in the top left corner ?

Then maybe looking at a graphics driver issue.

Try booting up with the boot parameter » nomodeset «:
This tutorial:
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=1613132

Let us know how it goes;
we get ya booting

Spilled the Beans

Re: Computer boots to terminal instead of GUI

Bashing-om; Hi and thanks for the reply.

Yes, I get a black screen that asks for the user name and password and then gives me a blinking cursor on the left side of the screen.

I followed the directions in the tutorial to update the grub configuration. I only got as far as the command «gksudo gedit /etc/default/grub» as pressing resulted in «Gtk-WARNING **: cannot open display:»

I was trying to add «nomodeset» to the GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT line but maybe I’m not understanding how to do it.

Any further enlightenment would be greatly appreciated.

Ubuntu Member

Join Date Jul 2010 Location ozarks, Arkansas, USA Beans 14,049 —> Beans 14,049 Distro Xubuntu 22.04 Jammy Jellyfish

Re: Computer boots to terminal instead of GUI

Pardon me, but I do not have a clear idea of what is going on here .
Let’s get to a real terminal and see what we can determine.
We do that from grub’s boot menu.
Reboot the system, and as soon as the bios screen clears depress and hold the right -shift key -; that brings up the grub boot menu.
with the top most current kernel selected (asterisk) press the ‘e’ key for edit mode -> boot parameters screen.
In this screen arrow down to the line similar » inux /boot/vmlinuz-3.13.0-24-generic root=UUID=217ed9a7-e11a-4e32-8c05-992e8c8932b6 ro quiet splash $vt_handoff » and replace » quiet splash $vt_handoff » with the term » text » with out the quotes;
key combo ctl+x to continue the boot process to the terminal TTY1.

Log into this terminal with your credentials.
Now we venture into waters I am not accustomed to in the LXLE environment. I am not sure what the Desktop Manager is at this time to start the GUI. But I «think» it is ‘lightdm’ .

Try this to start the GUI from terminal and to see if any errors are generated/reported.

sudo service lightdm start

I do expect the system to scream and holler, perhaps there is no graphics driver to drive the GUI . We will see and then take a look at that situation.

Admittedly, installing ‘buntu should not be at all difficult, but there are these outside cases . I will be interested to see how it relates with that old Nvidia graphics card .

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Ubuntu boots into command line instead of X

On my relatively new install, it’s booting into command line instead of X—again. This is the reason I reinstalled in the first place. This has happened to me three times now. So, I boot up and it gets past GRUB, past the glowing Ubuntu option, then it prompts me for my username, then password. I run: startx And that starts the GUI for about a minute, then it runs the GUI login system. To add to the mess, the network-applet is not shown in the panel. Additionally, Chrome will not launch (I ran Firefox from the terminal). What’s the problem here?

«happened before»; it was working correctly for a while, then this started? Did you install a graphics driver perhaps?

3 Answers 3

I’m curious as to what you mean by

So, I boot up and it gets past GRUB, past the glowing Ubuntu option, then it prompts me for my username, then password. I run:

startx

And that starts the GUI for about a minute, then it runs the GUI login system.

1. I boot
2. I login to terminal
3. I execute startx
4. X starts and I can mess around a bit
5. X gets clobbered by GDM — the GUI login

If so then for some reason GDM is taking a ridiculous amount of time to launch. Could be authentication backend related or just about anything.

In your place I’d start checking the logs :

/var/log/Xorg.0.log /var/log/auth /var/log/daemon /var/log/error /var/log/syslog 

At this point we’re fishing to try and figure out what’s going on on your system.

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Ubuntu boots to terminal on start up

For a long time I’ve been unable to get updates due to a «repositories not found» error. Yesterday someone fixed this for me but after installing 94 days worth of updates my system wanted to restart. It looks like it is booting normally but then it opens a terminal and asks for my login and password. I had tried Ctrl + Alt + F7 and startx to no avail. Here is everything that appears on screen when I turn the computer on.

Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS box-o-doom tty1 box-o-doom login:julian password: last login: Sun Jul 8 10:28:02 BST tty1 Linux box-o-doom 2.6.32-41-generic-pae #91-Ubuntu SMP Wed Jun 13 12:00:09 UTC 20 12 i686 GNU/Linux Ubuntu 10.04.4 LTS Welcome to Ubuntu! *Documentation: http://help.ubuntu.com julian@box-o-doom:~$_ 

[ 9.453119] type=1505 audit1341742405.022:10): operation="profile_replace" pid=743 name="/usr/lib/connman/scripts/dhclient-script" 

[ 9.475880] alloc irq_desc for 27 on node-1 [ 9.475883] alloc kstat_irqs on node-1 [ 9.475890]forcedeth 0000:00:07.0: irq27 for MSI/MSI-X [ 9.760031] hda_code:ALC662 rev1: BIOS auto-probing. [ 10.048095] input:HDA Digital PCBeep as /devices/pci 0000:00:05.o/inp ut/input6 [ 10.862278] ppdev: user-space parallel port driver [ 20.268018] eth0: no IPv6 routers present julian@box-o-doom:~$_ 

results of startx lots of text scrolls off the screen and i have no way of reading it. but everything i can see is reproduced below

current version of pixman: 0.16.4 Before reporting problems, check http://wiki.x.org to make sure that you have the latest version Markers: (--) probed, (**) from config file, (==) defult setting, (++) from command line, (!!) notice, (II) informational. (WW) Warning, (EE) error, (NI) not implemented, (??) unknown. (==) log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: SUn Jul 8 12:02:23 2012 (==) using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf" (==)using config directory: "/usr/lib/X11/xorg.conf.d" FATAL: Module nvidia not found. (EE) NVIDIA: Failed to load the NVIDIA kernal module please check your (EE) NVIDIA: systems kernal log for aditional error messages. (EE) Failed to load module "nvidia" (module specific error, 0) (EE) No drivers available. Fatal server error: no screens found please consult the X.org foundation support at http://wiki.x.org for help please also check the log files at "/var/log/X.org.0.log" for aditional informati on ddxSigGiveUp: Closing log giving up xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server xinit: No suck process (errno 3): server error julian@box-o-doom:~$_ 

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