How to boot into a terminal or shell

[Teunis]

Another 'update' from the kubuntu-ci weekly ppa has made it impossible to boot into anything usable, there's only a black screen and no controls except the Magic Keys.

Normally I would boot to a terminal and try the next update.

Now it looks there is no easy way to get a systemd distro to boot into the shell.
http://ask.xmodulo.com/boot-into-com...tu-debian.html

Should I be able to run these commands from the root shell?

One big problem I noticed while in the root shell is that I don't get a network.

Any suggestions to recover this system are welcome.

[claydoh]

Black screen with a mouse, by any chance? If so it's possible that Plasma has crashed and not re-started. If alt-f2 krunner works, try simply entering 'plasmashell' and see if that brings up. You can also run gui programs from there if it works

ctrl-alt-f2 should get you to a vt also.


networking in a grub recovery (root) console may not work for wireless, though it may if you modify the connection settings to make it available to all users , ie logging in and up before login.

you can open the connection editor via krunner using 'kde5-nm-connection-editor'. I am not sure this works with the rcovery login, though.

[LinkBot]

Now it looks there is no easy way to get a systemd distro to boot into the shell.

Using SDDM ?

The SDDM is a service



You could - https://wiki.archlinux.org/index.php/systemd

...

[FONT=sans-serif]# systemctl stop Stop a unit immediately:

[I]unit[/I]

...

Disable a unit to not start during bootup:

# systemctl disable unit

[/FONT]

Without the DM you will end to the tty.


Testing with the Debian Jessie & KDM:

[COLOR=#222222][FONT=sans-serif]# systemctl disable kdm[/FONT][/COLOR]

Log of systemctl disable kdm
Wed Jan 20 20:51:59 2016


Synchronizing state for kdm.service with sysvinit using update-rc.d...
Executing /usr/sbin/update-rc.d kdm defaults
Executing /usr/sbin/update-rc.d kdm disable
insserv: warning: current start runlevel(s) (empty) of script `kdm' overrides LSB defaults (2 3 4 5).
insserv: warning: current stop runlevel(s) (0 1 2 3 4 5 6) of script `kdm' overrides LSB defaults (0 1 6).

and reboot....

-> tty asking user name & password.


With the W:

sudo systemctl disable sddm

reboot...

[Teunis]

Claydoh and Linkbot, thanks for your tips but there really is nothing that works or accepts inputs.

Unless I should understand Linkbot's tips as that I can run those systemctl commands from the root shell?

During the failure of a couple of days ago I could indeed use the Alt+F2 route plus the various hotkeys would still call up their programs.

This time I don't get further than the root shell from the recovery mode.

iwconfig returns there is no WIFI adapter, ifconfig shows eth0 is available.
From the shell I can ping the IP's of my modem/router and even an IP of my provider.
But I can't get DNS to work, the command

dhclient eth0

returns the file already exists.

And without DNS I'm not able to run apt.

[Teunis]

I've been doing all the hard stuff to enable DNS from the shell but still wasn't able to contact the repositories.

After another attempt to just boot I came to a terminal with the option to log in.

This point did give me network access and the following updates have re-enabled the whole system!

Yes these bleeding edge repo's are a learning curve

Luckily I can always boot into 14.04.03 to interrogate Google or even change configuration files for 15.10.

Thanks for the ideas!