Tonight I upgraded from Ubuntu 22 to 24 and now I can’t get into my desktop
When I boot up, I get Grub; I press Enter to take the option “Ubuntu”; I get a quick flash of a rough splash screen; then instead of the normal logon screen I get a plain screen with a logon prompt in a small font top left. It says
Ubuntu 24.04.3 LTS shovel tty1
shovel login:
I can’t log in. I think I know my ID from bits of Terminal window on a backup drive.
If I see /home/paulssd2/Desktop then I think my login is paulssd2 yes?
But this, then my password, doesn’t work.
shovel is the name of my desktop.
Any ideas pls!!
The upgrade process went ok as far as I could see, though it paused to say I had a fwupd.conf file and did I want to keep mine or take the package manager’s. I did the latter.
I don’t think so.
I managed to log in with TTY, I was using the wrong ID. I’ve since been following suggestions from Copilot. There was no display manager, no gdm3, so I installed lightdm and then got as far as a “gui” logon screen. But this doesn’t work and now it seems there’s a networking issue because I got msgs saying gb.archive.ubuntu.com couldn’t be resolved. Quite messy for someone who doesn’t much understand all this stuff!
Hello, how did you upgrade? Using the Update manager and then say “upgrade to v24”? If so, this process can introduce errors. It is often recommended to do a fresh install using a usb stick with v24 and then overwrite the existing v22 install. Depending on how your partitions are setup, you might make a backup of relevant files before installing v24. Or just backup your home directory.
I always just upgrade, have done that for more than a decade (there was one reinstall, but that’s because I tried KDE Neon, which then broke during an upgrade of its own, so I returned to Kubuntu).
Where did you hear that? Ubuntu usually upgrades just fine. You can recover from interrupted upgrades most of the time. I have machines I have been upgrading for decades.
Well, if you got to a GUI, you can see if you have a network connection and go from there. I see that you have reinstalled now, so all of this is irrelevant, but for next time, a mobile phone tethered with an USB cable usually gives you network without any extra packages and you can proceed from there.
I am curious, did anything happen during the upgrade? A power outage, a network outage, etc? Any error messages? Full release upgrades usually just take a few minutes for me with a good network connection, so I just sit it out.
That was indeed the general sentiment 10–15 years ago, but now things are pretty stable, so most advice of that kind is outdated. For most users, reinstall from scratch makes sense only if they are changing filesystems, have major corruption in their setup, etc.
Reinstalling is a huge hassle compared to an upgrade, even when you have backups of everything.
A bit off-topic perhaps. I use Ubuntu since version 7 and I’ve always had the habit to install the OS on one partition (/) and /home on another. Reinstalling is a straightforward thing, just install on / .
Perhaps things are better now regarding upgrades (don’t know). But we still don’t know why the OP had a corrupted system after his upgrade…
That is good practice, but if you know how to do this, you probably know more than enough to recover from a failed upgrade too. 99% of the time apt-get install -f; dpkg --configure -a does the job.
I did the “do upgrade” command in Terminal after sudo apt updating and upgrading and rebooting ubuntu 22.04. All seemed fine with 22. A lot flashes by fast with the upgrade but I didn’t see any problems. Then when restarting it was rubbish. I made a few notes as I was using copilot to troubleshoot, which incidentally said there were upgrade issues with 24.
PAM was unable to open a shared object file pam_lastlog.so
A sudo systemctl status said “Unit gdm.service could not be found” in red.
I think there was a display mgr dmesg.service and the default one was /usr/sbin/gdm3.
On trying to install dgm3 I got “unable to correct problems, you have held broken packages” but doing commands suggested by copilot to fix the packages didn’t get anywhere.
When I’ve tried previously to work with >1 partition with a fresh install I could never work out how to do it. It seems very technical with mount points and stuff so I give the whole 250Gb SSD over to the install. I see this time it’s not made a swapfile which seems dodgy. I guess this is because I also have a 2Tb sata disk and there’s a swapfile on that which the install saw.
