Re: How to break to console on Mint Linux VM

On Mon, May 1, 2023 at 7:14 AM Ted Mittelstaedt <tedm@mittelstaedt.us>
wrote:

> Mount the Mint Mate VM as a secondary disk on some convenient VM and edit
> the password file to blank the password then dismount it and attempt to
> restart it again.  You might also edit ssh config to turn on ssh so you can
> ssh into it once it's started.  Or edit the X configs to get rid of X and
> boot to a command line login (I assume it's booting to X login)
>
> virtual machine - Mounting another VM's .vdi in VirtualBox - Unix & Linux
> Stack Exchange
> <https://unix.stackexchange.com/questions/105430/mounting-another-vms-vdi-in-virtualbox>
>
> Ted
> On 4/29/2023 6:32 PM, Kevin Oberman wrote:
>
> This morning I updated my Mint Mate VM and rebooted as directed. The
> system came up to the login screen and I entered the password. The screen
> expanded to its normal size, but the login screen just appeared again. Any
> entry of the password led me nowhere. I tried to boot headless, but could
> find no way to get to a login prompt.
>
> The system just returned:
> ptavv> VBoxManage startvm Mint --type headless
> Waiting for VM "Mint" to power on...
> VM "Mint" has been successfully started.
> ptavv>
>
> I am not a Linux expert and I'm mostly clueless about admin since systemd,
> and I don't make much use of this VM, but it is handy now and then.
>
> Can anyone provide a clue on how to try to rescue the system? Clearly,
> something is causing my session to exit on startup, but I have no idea what
> and, without command line access, I'm unlikely to find it
>
> Thanks. Since that was my only Linux VM, yesterday I threw up a new one
and did just that.Looks like something in the updated Mint does not like
something in the over 11K line long .tcshrc.* setup I use. Switch to bash
and it works. I really should switch to bash, I guess, but I have so much
committed to learning tcsh and tweaking things to be just like I want them
that it will be sad to say 'Goodbye'... and a new learning curve to make
bash sing and dance like my tcsh setup. does. OTOH, I can recover the brain
cells dedicated to dealing with tcsh scripting.

BTW, the magic to get a terminal login prompt is <Right-CTRL>-F[1-6]. F8 is
the X session. Learned this about 11 pm while reading VB documentation last
night.

Thanks so much for the suggestion!
-- 
Kevin Oberman, Part time kid herder and retired Network Engineer
E-mail: rkoberman@gmail.com
PGP Fingerprint: D03FB98AFA78E3B78C1694B318AB39EF1B055683