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After installing the good-bye-gdm-flick GNOME extension on 18.04.4, I am no longer able to log in. After logging in, only a purple screen is shown (mouse cursor active).

My next course of action would be to uninstall (delete) or disable the extension, but as far as I understand this cannot be done globally, but only in the user's home directory

~/.local/share/gnome-shell/extensions

But the user home directory is encrypted, so if I open a root shell in recovery mode I can't delete the extension.

I managed to mount the decrypted user data to /tmp with ecryptfs-recover-private, so my question is this:

If I edit the recovered data in the /tmp directory, does this have an effect on the encrypted data? i.e. is it possible to delete the extension in this way, or is the recovered data only a copy of the original data?

If so, is it in any way possible to delete/modify files in an encrypted home directory?

Or is there a possibility to somehow disable gnome extensions globally so the faulty code is not executed after login?

EDIT:

The answer of @ashvatthama of logging in via TTY worked!

Minor note for future readers: Don't know if this was only a glitch but I had to change to lightdm before I could open a TTY on the login screen. (I did this via dpkg-reconfigure lightdm from the root shell in recovery mode).

Dan
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nilo
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2 Answers2

4

if you regulary boot up to the login screen and then switch to the console Alt+Ctrl+F3 then login (be aware there is no graphical output on the password prompt). You than can follow the answer given here How do I enable and disable GNOME extensions from the command line? by typing:

gsettings set org.gnome.shell disable-user-extensions true

This will disable all user-extensions.

Switch back to the login screen via Alt+Ctrl+F1 and login.

Now you should be able to log in again, start Extensions reenable user-extensions and disable the extension in question.

d1bro
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I'd suggest that once you mount the encrypted home directory, just rm the extension files. The worst that can happen is that the file won't be actually removed, so it's worth a try.

Also: are you able to login via TTY (Ctrl-Alt-F2...)? if you can login to your user (as opposed to root) from there, then it should be even easier to remove it, without using ecryptfs.

pomsky
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ashvatthama
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