...and after nearly 20 years in IT (most of that on *nix) I should have known
better, but...   :-)

Lesson: Be careful what you put in /etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf. It can prevent
login.

Backstory: I applied updates as prompted tonight and after rebooting, it
(16.04.1 LTS) came up to the teal boot splash with the rotating circle and
did... nothing. No login prompt and no combination of Ctrl+Alt+Fx would give
me a console prompt.

But I was able to SSH in from my laptop! There were lots of messages in
/var/log/syslog about lightdm failing to start (tell me something I don't
know!) and 'systemctl status lightdm.service' confirmed it was down. There
were also a couple of messages about not being able to load
/etc/lightdm/lightdm.conf due to an entry not being in a group (or something
like that - Not on the box now to check).

Anyway, when I took a look at lightdm.conf, there was a "numlockx" line (the
only one) I had forgotten about putting there a few days ago... from
unverified online advice.  :-/  I was trying to get number lock to turn on
automatically, but obviously that's not the way to do it!  :-)  I deleted (the
otherwise empty) lightdm.conf and voila...! It works great again.

Once again, I should have asked the question: What did you change last? (only
this time of myself).

Speaking of number lock: Is there a way to reliably and safely enable it at
login?

Thanks.
--
Len Philpot
Sent from EPIM Pro
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