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 at texoma.net