Well, it’s always weird to encounter any bugs in Ubuntu. Even when I used the beta version of it (been doing it since 11.10 Oneiric Ocelot), I seldom if not never, apart from the annoying Apport, experienced any major bug. I did get a major bug when I tried to install KDE 4.10 on Precise using Kubuntu Backports PPA. But that was the only major bug for me, and it happened more than a year ago. And then, two days ago, I encountered similar bug.
The bug I encounter was the missing X. Pretty similar to the bug with KDE back then. The main differences are I got the bug from official main repo. Okay, I added few PPAs but I greatly suspected that the problem came from the main one. Because I used the update manager to update the HWE (Hardware Enablement) Stack.
So, for few minutes the update worked as it supposed to be. But after I left it for about fifteen minutes or so, the screen blanked. It’s my setting, so I didn’t suspect a thing at first. The problem appeared when I turned the screen on. I couldn’t type anything on the lock screen. The pointer was still move.
So I ran to TTY1 (Ctrl + Alt + F1) to reboot my machine, only to find I can no more enter TTY7 (GUI). Instead, I was sent directly to blank screen. And after some tweaks, I figured that I was in TTY1. What a weird behaviour.
The dmesg output is that LightDM returned code 1, which is an error. After checking the /etc, I found out that X is missing from my machine. So, what should I do?
Quick Googling suggested that I should reinstall the ubuntu-desktop package. A sound advice I think. I’ll try it later. For the meantime, I’d use the beloved Manjaro which asked for 1GiB updates. Sadly, no KDE 5 and still on KDE 4.14.1. I’ll wait to update it until the time of KDE 5’s arrival.
By the way (and logically), I’m so pissed off by the fact there’s (a) major bug like this on LTS version of Ubuntu. LTS supposed to be minimal on bugs. And if the bugs ever happened, they should be fixed quickly and not interfering with user experience like I did. Pretty much disappointed.
UPDATE :
Here’s the update. It turned out that the problem I encountered was really a bug. I found out on Launchpad that the bug came from HWE (Hardware Enablement) Stack as I suspected. The bug is reproducible by installing the update for the HWE Stack on Precise and then clean some configurations using Ubuntu Tweak. The bug caused the symlink to be broken. So, no X created. That’s why LightDM returned code 1 which is an error. LightDM couldn’t find any X in /etc/X11.
The workaround is to make a new symlink so the X can be created and found by LightDM. The command to execute in TTYx (x being whatever you choose, from TTY1 to TTY6) is “sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg-lts-trusty” and it will be solved. Then, restart your machine. If you happen to experience the bounce back, the moment when you enter the right password but you’re thrown away to LightDM again, is to run another code in TTYx which is “sudo chown -R $USER:$USER $HOME”. The last step is optional. You can also remove the Xauthority folder by running “sudo rm -rf ~/.Xauthority”. And then you’re all set.
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Notes of Belthsazar 