Ubuntu

Text-only login; no graphical desktop

Asked by Christian Hess

Hi. Although I'm an advanced Windows user, I'm relatively new to Ubuntu and Linux in general. Please assume newbie-level in your responses! Also, I'm not a native English speaker, so please also excuse typos and bad grammar. Thanks in advance. :-)

THE PROBLEM: When I boot into Ubuntu, the graphical splash screen disappears after a few moments and leaves me with a text-only login prompt. I can actually login, but only into a command-line interface.

HOW DID THIS HAPPEN? I had been using Ubuntu 8.10 normally for several days. Then I tried to manually install the latest version of GnuCash (2.2.8, since the "Add/Remove application" only shows an earlier version) by downloading and attempting to compile the source code. This got complicated when I was asked to first install other modules ("gettext" and "glib", if I recall correctly) but couldn't manage that (lots of downloading and "sudo" commands), so I gave up and tried to install GnuCash from the Appnr.com web site. I suspect that didn't end up well either, since the application icon on the main menu looked wrong. So I tried to uninstall the application, first from "Add/Remove" and then from Synaptic, but neither would launch after repeated attempts. I then tried to restart the system, and that's when the problem first appeared, as described above (no graphical desktop). In summary, I think I somehow "broke" the desktop while attempting to install GnuCash.

STEPS TAKEN AFTERWARDS: I have already tried the "recovery mode" option in GRUB to repair broken packages, as well as the X system. I expected this to work similar to the "System restore" option in Windows, but to no avail.

Should I try to re-install Ubuntu? Thanks in advance for your assistance!

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mak (iammak) said : 		#1

type:
startx

to get into the user friendly interface

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mak (iammak) said : 		#2

i hav another solution but you try this first

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Christian Hess (chessa) said : 		#3

Hi, mak, thanks for the help.

Tried "startx". For a moment, it looked like it would work (the gray screen with a black "X" in the center came up), but then it fell back to text mode again. There was a series of messages onscreen, ending with "Markers". Following are what look to me like the relevant results:

  (==) Log file: "/var/log/Xorg.0.log", Time: [the current date/time]
  (==) Using config file: "/etc/X11/xorg.conf"
  (EE) intel(0): underrun on pipe B!
  (EE) config/hal: couldn't initialise context: (null) ((null))

  Waiting for X server to shut down

In case it helps: at this point, I decided to try something bold (for me, at least): I went to "/etc/X11"; changed to root user (via sudo); deleted "xorg.conf" and substituted it using one of the "xorg.conf.yyyymmddhhmm" files in the same folder, that had the most recent date before I started having the problem; and rebooted. However, that didn't work either... :-(

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mak (iammak) said : 		#4

you can try and press alt+f1-f6

if this doesnt work then install updates of ubuntu and before that uninstall the things that you think may have caused this problem.

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Fredrik "DXter" Jonsson (dxter) said : 		#5

Try to reinstall the ubuntu-desktop package. It might help.

sudo aptitude reinstall ubuntu-desktop -y

Good luck!

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