Hello everyone,

We have a Ubuntu machine running at work on which we can SSH into. The only problem is the GUI of the machine is not working. At it's current state, the screen is frozen at the familiar splash screen with the Ubuntu logo and four-five dots underneath it. They are not animating and just still images.

I have no idea how to fix it and restarting the machine won't fix the issue as it will revert back - according to a co-worker. But the machine is running background tasks in the past for sure and like I said, we can SSH to it without any problem

I'm not exactly sure about the Ubuntu version but it is very likely to be Ubuntu 14.04-17.10.

Best

One of these commands can give you the version info
I'm not an Ubuntu user, but ff someone can edit grub (even temporarily), it should be possible to inhibit the splash screen at boot and gain a better idea of where in the boot process the problem is occurring perhaps. Do you happen to know which desktop environment it is using?

This can give a good overview of system information as well...

Thanks.

Scrolling through Ctrl+Alt+F1->F7 didn't quite work as expected. Only one of the combination did and upon reboot, the combination again didn't work.

Only way I managed to fix the problem was to ssh into the machine and reinstall the desktop.

Well at least you managed to resolve the problem. Well done.