The problem When I boot Ubuntu 11.10, the boot process hangs, before even getting to the login screen of the display manager, with the message
Could not write bytes: broken pipes
at the top of the screen, followed by some lines of text (where one yellow star left of "PulseAudio" is - don't know if this is important...), the last being
* Stopping System V runlevel compatability [Ok]
After that I can only press Ctrl+Alt+Del to reboot.
The cause The problem occured after I did an update on feb., the 18th. In the process of the update a window popped up in which I had to choose the default display manager. Being in a hurry, I just clicked "ok" (gdm was the default selection in that window). Afterwards I found out that Ubuntu 11.10 us es lightdm so I figured, that maybe this was the cause of my problem. Before this update everything worked fine.
{What I tried so far to do to fix it [skip this, if its too long] I logged in as root in recovery mode and tried to reinstall lightdm. Using the apt-get command I get error that spans over 3 lines of text, the first of which is
Not using locking for read only lock file /var/lib/dpkg/lock;
but I don't know of any process that is using apt-get, that is preventing it from being run.
After that I used dpkg-reconfigure lightdm
and selected lightdm as the default display manager. This exited with the line
mv: cannot move 'etc/X11/default-display-manager' to '/etc/X11/default-display-manager.pdkg-tmp': Read-only file system".
When I then booted in normal mode it still hung, but the message Could not write bytes: broken pipes
was gone, there were just two lines of text, the first said something about the battery state and the last was identical to the one above ("* Stopping System V[...]"). I played around a little bit by also trying dpkg-reconfigure gdm
and choosing gdm instead of lightdm, but none of that helped. The system still hangs, just with different lines of text showing up, but "* Stopping System V[...]" is always the last one. }
Other info This may be or not be relevant: I use multiple operating systems (the other ones work) and the kernel I use is 3.0.0-15-generic-pae.
Please help, I invested so much time in setting my Ubuntu system up, I don't want to do it all over again.