Broken gdm with on chromebook

[Joel Roth]

Dear List,

After a good run of a couple years, I got stubborn about trying to
get a larger cursor for my dad, who has vision problems, on a
Acer C7 chromebook running Trusty.

Since an upgrade that I did yesterday, I believe the system
uses upstart for the boot process.

The short story is that I was using icewm, and when I
couldn't get the big-cursor package to do anything decided
to install gdm, to get the default window manager running.

The system services start as usual, but instead of a login
prompt, I now get a blank screen. 

Although I believe grub-pc was installed to /dev/sda
there is no grub startup screen.

Is there any way for me to get a shell on boot?

For Chromebooks, I recall it is very difficult to create a
bootable USB.

Thanks for any hints!




-- 
Joel Roth