No desktop

[steeldriver]

OK so because the .Xauthority is owned by 'root', your normal user 'russel' won't be able to write to it, which will prevent russel's X session from starting - from the recovery console try

chown russel:russel /home/russel/.Xauthority

Then

exit

and continue to normal boot - see if you can log in to the GUI as russel then

[schragge]

If you're doing it in recovery console then you should first remount your root partition in read-write mode to be able to make any changes to it:

mount -o remount,rw /

That's if you have all your data in one disk partition. If, however, you have a separate /home partition then the relevant command would be

mount -o remount,rw /home

Then you'll be able to chown as steeldriver suggested above.

[steeldriver]

Thanks schragge - totally forgot that

[Russ_H]

Thanks schragge - totally forgot that

Thanks to you both!, it now boots in as normal. Minor point, does not worry me that much but if anyone is interested it still will not run in low graphics mode. Also the problem occurred after I had followed the advice to cure the initial problem that seemed to be related to the rng-tools, it did boot into user OK after that but I had to enter the password, I then set it to autologin and that is when the latest problem occurred. If any one wants me to do any further digging around for a bug report then I am happy to do so.