First off, VSIDIANS, sorry to post here after such a long period of silence, and then pop in as a lurker with a problem.
Initially I installed VSIDO on an internal flash volume partitioned to 8 gb (and several other partitions for various stuffs). I tend to run a fairly minimal system and have not installed too much, just scientific & data analytics software, and a slew of NCURSES lovelies, and have had flawless operations since my last post several months ago. Honestly, so few pains I have begun to get lazy! So, kudos VO, mainly a painfree (and junkfree) system.
But last weekend I installed a handfull of strategies games like chess, go, mahjong, etc. I reckon they were sizeable because a day or so later, I updated with 'up', worked a bit, shutdown, and rebooted later. On boot, I get to the screen which asks for my username and pw, enter it, and then get to an error message, approximately: 'xsession: cannot write to /tmp; xsession will not start' or somesuch. This means I cannot actually log in and am stuck on the login screen. Attempts to re-login always take me to the xsession cannot write message then back to the login screen. When I live boot from my VSIDO usbdrive, the install partition is nearly full. I am not sure if the culprits are the games, or the millions of updates I have had recently, or just my not frequently running 'apt-get clean,' or a cosmic thread or something.
I want to just log into the console/terminal, without the xsession or any graphical interface & clean house; but when I select 'e' or 'tab' from the x option in the lxde log in screen, the console options do not have apt, rm, or other bash shop cleaning utilities as far as I can tell. So, how can I log into a full console, but no xsession? I am sure there is a way to do this, but I just don't know how. Any pointers?