I’m running Gnome 44 I think. As title says, I can no longer get into login screen (gdm).
Last thing I see in the logs when booting up is something like “[ok] Graphic Interface smthn”, and then boom, black screen with dash in top left corner, nothing else.
Sorry for the poor explanation, I know no better terms.
Can you switch to a tty (Ctrl + Alt + F2 to switch to tty2)? If you can, switch to a tty, open the conf file with a text editor and comment out that line. If you can’t, boot into a live iso, mount your file system, access the file with a text editor and comment out that line.
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Unfortunately I tried but can’t switch to tty. Could you please elaborate on how to mount the system from a live ISO as you suggested? Much appreciated.
depending on what to do you can already mount your installed system drive and partitions from filebrowser in Live Session of the ISO.
I mean in case you only need to edit GDM config you do not need to archchroot, this is only need if you need to run commands.
https://discovery.endeavouros.com/system-rescue/arch-chroot/2022/12/
Because you are currently unable to do anything with your system (you can’t access a tty nor can you access a graphical environment), the only thing you can do is boot into a live session so that you can access (and therefore edit) your gdm config file.
However, when you boot into a live session, your hard drive essentially becomes an external storage device, and external devices aren’t mounted to the filesystem by default - they are not attached to the live iso’s filesystem tree. Therefore, in order to access your gdm config file (which is inside a partition of your hard drive) from the live iso, you have to mount the partition first.
Depending on your approach, this can be done as easily as clicking on the external drive’s icon in a graphical file manager like Thunar. The best approach, in my opinion, is to just use the mount command - simply because it will work on any linux system.
Inside the live iso, run this command first
lsblk
This will show a list of devices and the partitions they contain.
To mount a partition to a mount point, simply run:
sudo mount <device> <dir>
Substitute <device> with the block device (refer to the output of lsblk) containing the gdm config file. <dir> must be an existing directory on your filesystem (you can also pass the -m option to allow the mount command to make a new directory if the mount point doesn’t exist).
E.g: If the name of your block device is /dev/sda1, you can mount it like this:
sudo mount /dev/sda1 /mnt
After that, you can simply access the config file at /mnt/etc/gdm/custom.conf.
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I couldn’t thank you enough!
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