26

A weird thing happened today: I clicked on the terminal icon and it didn't launch - just blinked and disappeared. If I press Ctrl+Alt+T, it won't launch. I tried to launch a light terminal by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1. The login screen to put my login and password appeared, the system accepted the login and password but quickly returned to the login screen. It's a kind of loop: I enter the login and the system returns to the login screen. Xterm doesn't work too, however Unity seems to work correctly.

It's the first time that the terminal doesn't work, and I don't know how to fix this bug. I would appreciate any kind of help.

UPDATE:

I had installed mysecureshell before the reported issue and, when I removed this package, the problem was partially corrected. The terminal works (xterm too), but the light terminals (tty), accessed by Ctrl+Alt+F1, remain in loop during the login.

Below are pasted my .bashrc and the result of dmesg:

BeastOfCaerbannog
  • 16,703
leobap
  • 371

4 Answers4

32

In my case I upgraded python3.5 to python3.6.

For that workaround run xterm. Then run the following two commands:

sudo rm /usr/bin/python3

sudo ln -s python3.5 /usr/bin/python3
BeastOfCaerbannog
  • 16,703
Himanshu sharma
  • 421
15

I was having the same issue, but it was created as I updated python to 3.6 and selected alternative as python3.6. But when I reverted the option to the python3.5, terminal started working again.

So Can anyone tell me why did it happen? I used the command

sudo update-alternatives --config python3

The following message popped up:

There are 2 choices for the alternative python3 (providing /usr/bin/python3).

  Selection    Path                Priority   Status
------------------------------------------------------------
  0            /usr/bin/python3.6   2         auto mode
* 1            /usr/bin/python3.5   1         manual mode
  2            /usr/bin/python3.6   2         manual mode

Press <enter> to keep the current choice[*], or type selection number:

I selected 1 and it started working.

BeastOfCaerbannog
  • 16,703
Abhijeet Masal
  • 151
5

It may be too late for your case or maybe the solution works on me doesn't work on yours. My case is as below.

Recently, I ran into the condition that suddenly, the terminal program could not be started. I googled the web, and found 2 causes: one is incorrect locale settings, and the other is the original python3 being incorrectly replaced. In my case, I did install python3.4.6 while the existing python3 is python3.5.2. After I restore python3.5.2, the terminal program runs well again.

Reference: terminal won't launch after install python 3.5.

Good Luck.

Community
  • 1
Helen Lin
  • 71
2

For me, the problem was that I wasn't admin.
User Interface solution:

  1. Open settings
  2. Go to "Details" (usually last option on the left side-menu)
  3. Go to "Users"
  4. Select your user.
  5. You will see two options (Standard/Admin). Click on "Admin"
  6. That will ask you to close and open your user session. Do it
  7. Now you can open the terminal with CTRL+ALT+T
zx485
  • 2,865
Alvaro R
  • 21