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Ubuntu – Ubuntu 16.04 Login Loop After Update

16.04loginlogin-screen

Last Tuesday, I performed an software update for Ubuntu and related software. Seeing how they required a reboot, I restarted my PC and went to log back in. Only to find that I could not log back in due to being kicked back to the login screen again and again.

Here were some symptoms before I tried to attempt a few fixes.

  1. Boot up was a bit slower than usual.

  2. There seem to be some screen color pixelation second before booting to the login screen. I presumed this has to do with some sort of graphics driver issue, since after I tried purging the NVIDIA drivers and reinstalling some different ones, that symptom has since disappeared.

I have looked around for a couple solutions thus far, though nothing concrete in terms of results except purging the NVIDIA drivers seemed to work. While I was able to login successfully after that, it messed up the UI to the extent that it rendered it unusable.

First it changed the font to something so tiny that it was difficult to read, and it also seemed to mess with the resolution as well. Additionally, I could no longer access the UI menu at the top of the screen upon logging in. So I was forced to shutdown and reinstall the NVIDIA drivers, which brought me back to step 1.

Tried a couple other things, including updating software to see if something was missed, but to no avail. Perhaps I missed a step.

I am still a relative newbie to using Ubuntu, so any help in step by step detail would be appreciated. I will provide additional details if requested.

EDIT March 31 2018 / 10:28 PM

Got some new logs that may be of interest.
http://termbin.com/8wz4s
http://termbin.com/jzef
http://termbin.com/7nck

First two are xorgs. The last is dmesg.

Best Answer

I had something similar with my Mint 18 last evening after an upgrade of the package virtualbox-guest-utils. Solved it by removing all virtualbox packages: sudo apt-get remove virtualbox virtualbox-dkms virtualbox-guest-dkms virtualbox-guest-utils virtualbox-guest-x11

Followed by a reboot.

Not exactly a long term solution, but hopefully it will get you a usable PC until this get fixed.

Related Solutions

Ubuntu – login loop – ubuntu 16.04 – nvidia

The problem was basically nvidia drivers screwing up the system so badly that the nvidia re-install didn't work as expected.

They say to diagnose this is by running in the terminal: nvidia-smi which returned. NVIDIA-SMI has failed because it couldn't communicate with the NVIDIA driver

The solution was basically a full re-install of the OS. So downloading ubuntu 16.04 in a USB drive, re-installing ubuntu.

Then: 

$ sudo apt-get install linux-headers-$(uname -r)
$ sudo apt-get --purge remove nvidia-*
$ sudo apt autoremove

this is the driver for GTX 1080 from: https://developer.nvidia.com/cuda-downloads?target_os=Linux&target_arch=x86_64&target_distro=Ubuntu&target_version=1604&target_type=debnetwork 

$ sudo dpkg -i cuda-repo-ubuntu1604_9.1.85-1_amd64.deb
$ sudo apt-key adv --fetch-keys http://developer.download.nvidia.com/compute/cuda/repos/ubuntu1604/x86_64/7fa2af80.pub
$ sudo apt-get update
$ sudo apt-get install cuda

then reboot and everything works, for now. Thanks nvidia for your trashy software!

Here is the discussion of the topic from nvidia-forum with some extra details.

Related Question
  • Ubuntu – login loop – ubuntu 16.04 – nvidia