Comment 191 for bug 25931

I experienced this behaviour today (2009-01-19) on Ubuntu 8.10:

everything worked for me after the dist-upgrade some time ago.

But, today I accidentally disabled the 'dbus' service within the services-admin tool. The X server was restarted automatically and I was not able to login anymore. The cursor was blinking but no mouse or keyboard was usable. Switching to a shell by Alt+F6 was possible. Here I manaully started the dbus service and I could login again.

So, I opened the services-admin tool to re-enable the dbus service, rebooted the machine...and was not able to login. Same thing as before. I tried re-installing dbus, hal, system-tools-backends...no results.

I was able to fix the problem by changing the priority of the rc2.d/dbus script:

after disabling dbus in GUI:

user@host:/etc$ ls -l /etc/rc*/*dbus*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc1.d/K88dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-01-19 22:38 /etc/rc2.d/S50dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc3.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc4.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc5.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
user@host:/etc$ ls -l /etc/rc*/*hal*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc0.d/S90halt -> ../init.d/halt
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-05-09 17:36 /etc/rc1.d/K16hal -> ../init.d/hal
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-05-09 17:36 /etc/rc2.d/S24hal -> ../init.d/hal
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-05-09 17:36 /etc/rc3.d/S24hal -> ../init.d/hal
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-05-09 17:36 /etc/rc4.d/S24hal -> ../init.d/hal
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-05-09 17:36 /etc/rc5.d/S24hal -> ../init.d/hal
user@host:/etc$ ls -l /etc/rc*/*gdm*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc0.d/K01gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc1.d/K01gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc2.d/S30gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc3.d/S30gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc4.d/S30gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc5.d/S30gdm -> ../init.d/gdm
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 13 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc6.d/K01gdm -> ../init.d/gdm

Fix:
user@host:/etc$ sudo mv /etc/rc2.d/S50dbus /etc/rc2.d/S12dbus
user@host:/etc$ ls -l /etc/rc*/*dbus*
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc1.d/K88dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2009-01-19 22:38 /etc/rc2.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc3.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc4.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 14 2008-04-28 18:11 /etc/rc5.d/S12dbus -> ../init.d/dbus

Finally everything is working again - but somewhere weird things happen.