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I was stupid, I kept ignoring the warnings that my harddrive space was running low and left a download running in the background. When I logged out, I wasn't taken back to the login screen (LightDM), and when I rebooted I didn't get the login screen either. Instead I got a terminal-like screen that listed drivers/daemons being loaded, but didn't have a prompt. I could still access the terminal with Ctrl-Alt-F1 (and F2 etc).

After barking up many wrong trees I solved it by deleting a file or two. My question is, why did this happen?

lofidevops
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2 Answers2

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If the root partition has filled (or the partition that holds /var to be more precise), there will not be any space to write to /var/log/auth.log, which usually prevents login attempts from anyone besides the superuser.

The same goes for /home. There are files in your home directory that have to be updated and if there is no space left on the device will prevent you from logging in.

Rinzwind
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0

Either /tmp filled up so it couldn't create .X11-unix or /home filled up so it couldn't create .Xauthority. Either way, graphical login would be nonfunctional.

Modern Ubuntu defaults to a RAM-backed /tmp; however I recall in 2012 this was not the case.

Joshua
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