A TTY Can Save Your Bacon
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I recently was unable to boot into my home Linux Desktop, it got stuck at diskcheck . I found that I was able to get in to a tty through a hotkey.

Date: April 8, 2022

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.

https://twitter.com/_WaylonWalker/status/1512281106120384519

What’s a TTY?
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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
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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??
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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
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The final commands that ended up getting me back in were installing and starting gdm3.

```
sudo apt install gdm3
sudo systemctl start gdm3
```