Restarting gdm in 18.04 doesn't work

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gdm may be buggy.

As a workaround, I use lightdm.

sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm

Choose lightdm as the display manager. And X restart works.

sudo service lightdm restart
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m93a
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m93a

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Updated on September 18, 2022

Comments

  • m93a
    m93a over 1 year

    When I try to run one of these commands:

    sudo service gdm restart
    sudo service gdm3 restart
    

    the system gets stuck in a loop. It goes from the graphical interface to a black screen, then a terminal-like screen with lots of [ OK ] and then again GUI, this repeats cca every second.

    It is impossible to stop this, as GUI ceases to respond to any keystrokes and tty randomly misses some of them (so that it's not possible to correctly input the password).

    What is the correct procedure for restarting X then?
    (I'm on a freshly installed Ubuntu 18.04 on Acer A315)

    • Admin
      Admin almost 6 years
      I think the new command is sudo systemctl restart gdm.service as Ubuntu can be using systemd
    • Admin
      Admin almost 6 years
      @SmitTheLastFirefoxUser That does the same thing for me...
    • Admin
      Admin almost 6 years
      I don't why but this should work if Ubuntu is using systemd as this works for me in arch Linux with systemd. Look like Ubuntu does something else behind the scenes that I am yet to find.
    • Admin
      Admin over 5 years
      This was an issue too in Solus Linux - This was solved there after update of gdm and after update of NVIDIA drivers with update of gnome - this issue is caused by a bug in NVIDIA.
  • R. W. Prado
    R. W. Prado about 2 years
    I must agree with you. It's quite rare to reproduce the same behavior two or more times, even in a good scenario.