lightdm fail to start automatically after last update

Question

I have 12.04 LTS, I don't think I installed anything extraordinary lately, (just uninstalled lxc-docker), but after last automatic update I am left with console. I can do

service lightdm start

and everything works fine. I checked upstart jobs, and lightdm is not there until I start it manually. I have followed http://upstart.ubuntu.com/wiki/Debugging and added verbose mode, but no information about lightdm. I also reconfigured lightdm, no change. I checked /var/logs but did not find anything useful in syslog, dmesg.. My question is, how to debug the problem?

Solution

It is a long-standing bug in Ubuntu: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/lightdm/+bug/969489

Most common workaround is to add

respawn

in /etc/init/lightdm.conf to ensure it stays up even it fails to start at the first try.

Comments

[ali]

Your answer might be here: [lightdm-not-starting-on-boot][1]. At least that is what worked for me. [1]: askubuntu.com/questions/74551/lightdm-not-starting-on-boot

[Lane]

That didn't help. One more observation: executing shutdown 0 fails on Could not get the system bus .. failed to connect to socket .. no such file After that if I press Control-D few more services start up: virtualbox, winbind,cpufreq. This looks like somewhere in middle upstart decides to fail, givin no information why