Locking up when logging out.

[sktsee]

On Sun, 19 Jan 2014 03:23:40 +0000, Christian wrote:

> Hi,
> 
> I am running Ubuntu 13.10 x64 on a Thinkpad laptop. Everything works
> except for one thing: Often when I log out of a account I end up with a
> black screen with a blinking cursor "-" on the top left of the screen.
> The only way out of it is opening another console and reboot from there.
> I have tried to kill the locked up session but do not know how to get
> back to a login prompt. This doesn't happen all the time but it is
> probably around half of the times I log out. Otherwise my install is
> pretty standard running Unity as desktop and LightDM as display manager.
> There's no such problems when I reboot.
> 
> Any idea what may be causing this?

Not sure what's causing the problem, but you can probably recover by 
switching to a vt (ctl-alt-f1) and then run 'sudo service lightdm 
restart' to get back to the lightdm login prompt.

To troubleshoot after getting the black screen error on logout, I would 
stop the lightdm service ('sudo service lightdm stop') and then check the 
Xorg.0.log in /var/log and the logs in /var/log/lightdm for errors. Also, 
it wouldn't hurt to look at the end of ~/.xsession-errors to see if 
there's some process that hanging preventing the session from exiting 
properly.

-- 
sktsee