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I recently was unable to boot into my home Linux Desktop, it got stuck at
diskcheck fsck. I found that I was able to get in to a tty through a hotkey.
82893914398732r.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1512281106120384519
What's a TTY? #
There's probably more to it, but to me its a full screen terminal with zero gui, not even your gui fonts. It does log into your default shell so if you have a comfy command line setup it will be here for you even though it looks much different without fonts and full colorspace.
Normal setup #
Normally you have 6 TTY's running, the first is dedicated to your desktop manager, which is your login screen it might be something like gdm or lightdm.
- ctrl+alt+F1: login screen
- ctrl+alt+F2: Desktop
- ctrl+alt+F3: TTY 3
- ctrl+alt+F4: TTY 4
- ctrl+alt+F5: TTY 5
- ctrl+alt+F6: TTY 6
In my case the desktop manager neverstarted, so ctrl+alt+F1 brought me into a tty.
What happened?? #
Well after getting back in and having some time to reflect, I think my Desktop manager was installed or just broken, possibly during a update I ran a few days prior.
I tried a bunch of things like switching to lightdm, and manually running startx.
Getting back in #
The final commands that ended up getting me back in were installing and starting gdm3.
sudo apt install gdm3 sudo systemctl start gdm3