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Niklas
Asked: 2019-01-05 14:33:31 +0800 CST

gdm3 display manager hangs after booting with Ubuntu 18.10

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I want to use gdm3 but unfortunately, it does not work. After booting it just completely hangs.

enter image description here
boot process stopped after Started GNOME Display Manager

It just does not do anything. Installing lightdm and activating it via sudo dpkg-reconfigure lightdm does work but then again that's not what I want.

I tried several things already:

  • Reinstalling NVIDIA drivers
  • Changing my run level to multi-user.target
  • Using update-rc.d -f gdm3 remove && update-rc.d gdm3 defaults to reconfigure gdm3
  • Installing the packages that I need sudo apt-get install ubuntu-gnome-desktop gnome-shell gnome
  • Reinstalling gdm3

Does anyone know how I can get gdm3 to work?

gnome gdm nvidia timeout 18.10

2 Answers

  1. Best Answer

    Not sure if this is going to fix your problem, but it's quick, so it's worth a try...

    You may have a problem with an older computer, with an older GPU. Try this...

    • boot to recovery mode
    • choose root access

    type:

    sudo mount -o remount,rw /      # to remount the disk r/w

sudo pico /etc/gdm3/custom.conf # edit this file

    change:

    #WaylandEnable=false

    to:

    WaylandEnable=false

    Then reboot.

    • 3

  2. I can't comment yet but this is an extension of Niklas comment on heynnema's answer.

    I ran into this issue booting my new installation of 20.04.3 which is the latest LTS version. So the problem still exists, and this solution still works.

    Niklas was correct that the problem is in the BIOS most likely. However there is an alternate solution if you still want to use your Nvidia graphics card instead of the built in Intel one.

    The only change here is instead of disabling your card in favor of the built in graphics unit, there should be a list of options above the graphics selection in the BIOS under the name "BUS Options" or something similar. Within this menu you will see an option to enable/disable the built in video card. If you disable it, you should be able to boot to GDM successfully with your Nvidia card.

    This is the steps I took for my machine, your BIOS may be different. Though I believe the core problem here is that both the built in and PCI graphics units are enabled, causing something to hang during boot time. There may be a fix to enable both, but a solid solution for now is to simply disable one or the other.

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