KDM takes several minutes to start on Edgy

Can you try to switch to tty1 (Strg+Alt+F1) and then back to tty7 (Strg+Alt+F7).

Does kdm start up then?

I tried that several times, thinking that maybe X was starting but I just wasn't being switched to tty7. I don't think I ever tried to start kdm *from* tty7, though, if that's what you mean?

No, i did just mean that you should switch between tty1 and tty7. I asked you to to that, because i have a similar problem: KDM doesn't start up after the splash screen appears. Switching to tty1 and back to tty7 brings kdm up.

Ah yeah, that didn't do the trick here.

I can confirm the bug. My edgy system displays a black screen after boot. When I press ALT, I see the login screen of tty1. Then when I press ALT-F7 it will start X and kdm will run normally.

I switched to GDM as a workaround, which works fine. Seems to be a kdm-specific bug.

I can confirm the bug too. Pressing ctrl-alt-f7 after usplash disappears launches KDM.

I have solved the problem for me: I upgraded to edgy without upgrading to upstart , because I had removed the packages ubuntu-minimal and ubuntu-base.
So, I reinstalled those, and at the next boot KDM showed up as expected.

Thank you Guillaume, after executing apt-get install ubuntu-minimal I also found that I was still on the old sysvinit and not upstart.

Now the problem is gone for me too.

Rocco: Does Guillaume's tip help you, too?

I'm afraid not. Looks like there's no such package as ubuntu-base anymore. I did reinstall ubuntu-minimal, some dependencies of which hadn't been installed, including upstart-logd, but reinstalling didn't help. I did notice something potentially helpful, though. When I start kdm, nothing seems to happen. When I try to stop it, it says it's not running because there's no pid file, but there's a kdm process and a kdm-config process that I have to kill manually.

I tried again, to see what I could see about those two processes. I attached to each of them with strace and saw no activity. The kdm process seemed to be hung up on a read. Peeked at the xorg log, saw nothing interesting. I was just about to switch back to gdm when bam, I got an nvidia splash screen. This probably took about 2 minutes. It also took longer than usual (not sure how long, I went out to smoke) to get past the bare X screen with that "x" cursor. I've seen some similar behavior on Gnome desktops when there's a firewall blocking invalid packets regardless of source (Gnome generates a lot of that on lo, it looks like) but I'm not running Gnome and not running a firewall on this box. I've also seen similar stuff when lo is down, which it's not here. I'm going to change the description of this bug.

Edgy is not supported anymore and this problem does not seem to have ever occurred on any successive release. If this problem can be reproduced on hardy, please re-open with the necessary information.

Thanks