Addendum 3:
"Starting NTP service. Please wait." did not complete in 20 minutes.
ctrl-alt-f2 was functional, ps auxw | grep ntp showed 4 lines of
output, namely:
S+ sh -c /sbin/service ntpd start > /dev/null
S+ /bin/sh /sbin/service ntpd start
S+ b/inbash /etc/init.d/ntpd start
S+ /bin/systemctl start ntpd.service
regards/vaden(a)texoma.net