You should be able to boot off a live CD (or equivalent), su/sudo to root, mount the hard disk and chroot to it. That should get you into the new system as root, where you could reset passwords as desired. Then you could reboot and log on normally to investigate it. But I've not had to do it myself so I'm not sure if I've missed a step.

Or you could just back up the hard disk from the live system, eg over the network to one of your existing systems.

Or use the live system to edit /etc/shadow on the new system to set the root password hash to the same as on a system where you know the root password.

Chris

Are there tabs instead of spaces in your /etc/apt/sources.list ? Or any other strange characters?

If you can't see anything post output from od -xc /etc/apt/sources.list here (it will be a bit lengthy).

Chris

Also try lspci | grep -i NVIDIA followed by lspci -v -s 01:00 (replace 01:00 with the first 5 chars of output from the first command). That should show what kernel driver is in use. Post output here if you are not sure what it means.

Also search the forum for CUDA. I had a lot of "fun" getting it working on my system and posted details of what I had to do. They should help.

Chris

Does lightdm read the user's groups when it starts up and cache them (thus missing groups if LDAP isn't fully up then)? That's the only thing I can think of that would explain why restarting lightdm would make it start working.

Can you delay lightdm starting until after LDAP, wicd, etc are fully initialiased?

Chris

Hello,

Looking at that I think it's all OK, you don't need to fix anything. System IDs not having a home dir is not a problem.

tty1 to tty6 are the text terminals you can log on to from ctrl-alt-f1 to f6 (at least on Devuan). It's odd that alien-os appears to be logged on to them if you havn't logged on there, but probably harmless.

Chris

First try cat /etc/passwd and see if there's more than 1 entry for alien-os.

Then pwck -r and grpck -r as root to check for errors in the relevant files. They can delete incorrect entries if run without -r (which means read-only) but read the man pages and use that with caution.

Chris

Try sensors which should say something like this:

$ sensors
atk0110-acpi-0
Adapter: ACPI interface
Vcore Voltage:       +1.21 V  (min =  +0.80 V, max =  +1.60 V)
 +3.3 Voltage:       +3.38 V  (min =  +2.97 V, max =  +3.63 V)
 +5 Voltage:         +5.21 V  (min =  +4.50 V, max =  +5.50 V)
 +12 Voltage:       +12.32 V  (min = +10.20 V, max = +13.80 V)
CPU FAN Speed:      1205 RPM  (min =  600 RPM, max = 7200 RPM)
CHASSIS1 FAN Speed: 1088 RPM  (min =  600 RPM, max = 7200 RPM)
CHASSIS2 FAN Speed:    0 RPM  (min =  600 RPM, max = 7200 RPM)
POWER FAN Speed:       0 RPM  (min =  600 RPM, max = 7200 RPM)
CPU Temperature:     +80.0°C  (high = +60.0°C, crit = +95.0°C)
MB Temperature:      +33.0°C  (high = +45.0°C, crit = +75.0°C)

coretemp-isa-0000
Adapter: ISA adapter
Core 0:       +74.0°C  (high = +89.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)
Core 2:       +74.0°C  (high = +89.0°C, crit = +105.0°C)

That's on a desktop though so your output won't match that.

Chris

OK, that's one possible cause ruled out.

Chris

That would not work on my devuan system:
chris@rigel:~/bin$ xinput --list
bash: xinput: command not found

So how can it be done without asking the user to install xinput?

Chris

Can you log on to it from another system (eg via ssh)? If you can then try to use that session to gather data about what tasks are running before and after a hang. And try sudo shutdown -r now as a gentler way to reboot it than the power switch.

Chris

That message might mean you have a symlink loop, eg file a is a symlink to file b, which is a symlink to file a. Try ls -ld /sbin/init to see if it's a symlink to somewhere. If not try searching for a loop in /etc/rc?.d/ (I don't think a hanging symlink would cause this problem).

Chris

To check if you have sudo set up correctly try sudo id (you should get something like):

chris@rigel:~/ggnfs/tests$ id
uid=1000(chris) gid=1000(chris) groups=1000(chris),24(cdrom),25(floppy),27(sudo),29(audio),30(dip),44(video),46(plugdev),103(netdev),114(lpadmin),116(scanner)

chris@rigel:~/ggnfs/tests$ sudo id
[sudo] password for chris: 
uid=0(root) gid=0(root) groups=0(root)

Chris