cantor, you ask do you have done all of this only on TTY?If you mean, did I perform the attempts that I listed by issuing the commands in a text terminal, I think the answer is yes. I used F1, logged in and did the things with sudo.
I have tried one more thing: sudo mv /etc/init.d/lightdm /etc/lightdm and re-boot.No difference. So during boot it seems to be finding out how to start lightdm from some other source.
