How can I boot to terminal?

Question

After installing package touchegg my laptop will not boot. I want to boot to terminal and run apt-get purge touchegg. How can I boot to terminal and/or otherwise run this command?

I can get as far as the login screen. I login > desktop starts to load > Freeze.

@M.Becerra - That lets me login normally. What does that do exactly? I removed touchegg and it still crashes so I need to uninstall something else. — P.Brian.Mackey, May 15 '17 at 18:59
Well you can use history to check what are the last commands you ran, maybe that gives you a hint — M. Becerra, May 15 '17 at 19:01
@M.Becerra - Thanks!! Those 2 things fixed it. Post an answer and I'll give you credit. It was sudo apt-get purge gimp inkscape — P.Brian.Mackey, May 15 '17 at 19:08

M. Becerra · Accepted Answer · 2017-05-15T19:28:50.980

5

Before loging in press Ctrl+Alt+F1 to change to tty1 and use your username and password to login. After that you can use history to get the last commands used, and that should give you a hint on what caused the issue, and possibly a solution.

In this particular case what did it, somehow, was : sudo apt-get purge gimp inkscape touchegg

edited May 15 '17 at 19:28

answered May 15 '17 at 19:22

M. Becerra

424

score 0 · Answer 2 · answered May 15 '17 at 19:09

0

Before logging in, press Ctrl-Alt-F1. That will open a terminal window. More info regarding the different terminal key combos

answered May 15 '17 at 19:09

Mike Waters

209

Ctrl-Alt-F1 works different in Elementary than it does in Ubuntu. It does NOT take you to a terminal screen in Elementary. It did something though which let me login. Running history let me find the problem. Because M. Becerra first mentioned both of these steps I picked this answer. – P.Brian.Mackey May 15 '17 at 19:25

How can I boot to terminal?

2 Answers2