Ubuntu 12.10 start hangs after checking battery state

I have been running ubuntu 12.10, 64 bit for over a month now on my Lenovo T430. Intermittently as i startup, it would go through the startup process and get to a message “Checking Battery Sate” and then hang (It just looks like it is hanging, in fact what is happening is that, X seems to be crashing). When this happens i do not get a Desktop window and hence i could not  login.

There seems to be some bugs on launchpad (1061149,834592), which do not seem to be conclusive on the fix. Looks like an option is to login and then do a startx. Other solutions talk about using a lower version of lightdm. Not entirely sure what the fix is. Running startx is not working for me.

Here is what i have been doing.

Once i get the message “Checking battery state” and it hangs, i do <Ctrl><Alt><F2>, get a login screen. Login, then switch to root. Then

pkill X

This leads to x restarting  and gives me the login screen.

Update Dec 12 2012 : Today once this happened, and i did a pkill and got my GUI login screen, even though i was typing in my password, it just kept coming back to this Login screen (Would not login to my desktop). To fix this, i had to do <Cntrl><Alt><F1> get a login screen, login, mv .Xauthority .Xauthority-original, and then rebooted again. Once i got my login screen again i was able to log back in. So somewhere along the line, looks like, something corrupted my .Xauthority file.

Hope this will be helpful to someone.

4 thoughts on “Ubuntu 12.10 start hangs after checking battery state

  1. Wow thank you so much. This is the third time happening to 12.10. It made Linux less reliable than windows. I was even afraid of having any data locally saved in case this would happen again. This morning when this happened again, I almost reinstalled Ubuntu from scratch just when I found this post. It is the solution. The Xauthority file was empty. After moving it like you suggested and rebooted, not only it works, the file has now one line of entry.

    I really hope they find this problem and fix it soon. It is very frustrating.

  2. I’ve been struggling with this on my Lenovo B570 (Ubuntu 12.10) for a while now. Thanks for sorting it out! Haven’t checked the Xauthority file yet, but I definitely will now.

  3. Just followed your tips and it got me so far as getting to the command line.

    I eventually traced my problem to the VM disk being full even though the VM disk is set to dynamic so it should just grow. I cleaned up the disk and got down to 84% full and the system rebooted okay.

    So check your disks to make sure you have space to boot the system.

    Roger R.

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