Thanks Sebastien for the reply, I was begining to think I was all alone here.
Well as you surmised, I was wrong. The inability to login through the graphical desktop cropped up again, running GDM, on battery power. Guess I never paid attention to whether my laptop was running on battery or not … why should I have to? Anyway it is obviously not a Lightdm bug, nor a GDM bug, but it seems to me it is definitely a bug as all I changed was to do the distro-upgrade from 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS. Have no idea what the cause of the problem is now, what package is at fault, but I'll tell how my system behaves in hope someone more knowledgeable about what goes on behind the GUI will find a clue. I reinstalled lightdm, since it was not the source of the problem, making it the default display manager. I also reinstalled ubuntu- desktop, which was automatically removed when I removed lightdm. Interestingly it was identified as britty-ubuntu-desktop. I did not reinstall lightdm-GTK-greeter. When I rebooted and initially tried to login I was caught again in the endless login loop (see previous post). This I was able to correct with: sudo chown -R user:user /home/user Which I learned about here: http://b1ackb0x.blogspot.com/ Then I was able to login as follows: On battery power … ubuntu 2D On AC power … ubuntu 3D, or 2D If I try to login to ubuntu 3D on battery power nothing happens, well the harddrive activity light flickers off and on, but the greeter desktop remains and is frozen, the clock does not even advance. I can drop to a command prompt (Ctrl-Alt-F1) and login that way and is how I was able to reinstall lightdm. I cannot gedit, I guess for the same reason the desktop freezes. Oddly, at least to me, if I ctrl-alt-f7 I get to the graphical desktop with desktop icons and unity sidebar, but a blank banner with no controls at the top. And it is frozen. Hope someone can figure this out and fix it. -- You received this bug notification because you are a member of Desktop Packages, which is subscribed to lightdm in Ubuntu. https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/1070655 Title: 12.04 LTS Hangs on login Status in “lightdm” package in Ubuntu: New Bug description: Recently upgraded my laptop from Ubuntu 10.04 LTS to 12.04 LTS. Everything seemed to go well, system booted into 12.04, albeit very slowly. Was able to login no problem. Then shutdown. On next reboot ran into problem where system hangs at login. Get to splash screen with request for user password and have mouse control at that point, but when I enter my password the system stops responding. Ultimately I have to force a shutdown with the power button. The behavior is somewhat erratic in that sometimes the password request disappears along with the banner at top, other times it does not. Ocassionally I can succesfully login, after severl tries over the course of a hafl hour or more. Seems to be just happenstance. Have noticed a few things. First time after I upgraded and loggen in there was a login sound. Now the sound is muted, every time. My GRUB default kernel is 3.2.0-31. If I use GRUB I can usually login using the next kernel down the list, 2.6.32-43. I also have kernal 3.2.0-32 on the machine, but it does not show up in GRUB. I can't explain why not I can send along whatever log files you want, just need to know where to find them ... and succesfully login. To manage notifications about this bug go to: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bug/1070655/+subscriptions -- Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages Post to : desktop-packages@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~desktop-packages More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp