Stuck at the above screen after you reboot your Ubuntu 20.04, this is a very common problem when you install Graphical Desktop Environment (GDE) such as xfce4, lightdm, Ubuntu Desktop etc in your Linux Environment. If you face the same issue.

For those of you who have your server in Contabo and use their vncviewer for out of band management of your VPS or VDS running Ubuntu 20.04. Like me you might realized that after installing xfce4 and tightvncserver in the target Ubuntu 20.04 server. This might be a tutorial to help you regain the access to the server console.

What we are going to do here is to modify the grub menu to allow console from serial which is what the out of band VNC Management allows in Contabo. This problem exists when you are setting up your KVM guest VMs as well.

Always make a backup of your original config so that you can restore configuration if anything goes wrong.

sudo cp /etc/default/grub /etc/default/grub.bak

Next let’s add the following to the grub file.

sudo nano /etc/default/grub

GRUB_TERMINAL=console
GRUB_SERIAL_COMMAND=”serial –unit=0 –speed=115200 –word=8 –parity=no –stop=1″
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX_DEFAULT=””
GRUB_CMDLINE_LINUX=”text console=tty0 console=ttyS0,115200n8″

This should allow you to get access to the console again.