Ubuntu netbook upgrade from 10.04 to 10.10 on Acer AOA150 freezes on empty desktop

I did have the same problem, but I thought it ws entirely my fault, since I normally do things to a system normally only a beta-tester would.
Since the computer only froze when I used my password - but it worked fine when my girlfriend logged in --- my solution was deleting all user-specific configuration files for my account:

- Go to another virtual console by pressing Ctrl+Alt+F1
- Log in with your user name
rm .local .gconf .config .compiz -r -f

The disadvantage of this aproach that it deletes the information about all settings you have changed for all programs except of maybe firefox, thunderbird and a few other programs that maintain their own config directory. A better approach would be temporarily renaming individual subdirecories of .local or .config with the mv command:

mv OldName NewName

...and renaming them back until you have found which directory gives you problems.

Or at least try to find out which directory the erroneous config value is in:

(Press Ctrl+Alt+F1)
mv .local .local.old
(Press Alt+F7 to return to the graphical console and try logging in. If this doesn't work)
mv .local.old .local
(Press Ctrl+Alt+F1)
mv .config .config.old
(Press Alt+F7 to return to the graphical console and try logging in. If this doesn't work)
mv .config.old .config

...and so on.

If we knew which setting does give problems -it would be much easier to hunt the bug.
At least if it is my bug and not a completely different problem. Most of the times an engineer is confronted with a single (and most of the time rather simple) problem, even if it does at first not appear to be this way.
...But in the end you never know...

I opened the new virtual console and deleted settings as described but this had no effect. Further to that, there is only one user on the system and no password other than for system settings, and I accepted the option to update settings files when 10.10 installed. It will go to screen saver, and when you return from screensaver the cursor is visible, but there is no desktop visible, just the wallpaper.

D'Ough!

On the login screen after selecting your user name you can choose between different types of sessions: Gnome, save gnome or something and...

Does this help?

...And if not... perhaps we can find out which process hangs:

Go to a virtual console and type in

top

Perhaps this program shows which process hangs.

Or -10.10 is still beta- the next update fixes it:

sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

eventually followed by a

sudo apt-get autoremove.

D'Ough!

On the login screen after selecting your user name you can choose between different types of sessions: Gnome, save gnome or something and...

Does this help?

...And if not... perhaps we can find out which process hangs:

Go to a virtual console and type in

top

Perhaps this program shows which process hangs.

Or -10.10 is still beta- the next update fixes it:

sudo apt-get update;sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

eventually followed by a

sudo apt-get autoremove.

I tried "top" and there were no active process hogging the sytem (the highest was "top" on 1% cpu time). tried the update process, and the result was 0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded. I only did the upgrade today. I do not get to a login screen to make a choice. grub shows 10.10 kernel 2.6.35-22 and kernel 2.6.32-25 as options. Neither of them work.

If you log in as a different user, is it ok? Make another user if you only have one (preemptive answer)

Another idea:

On my computer I get two times the chance to decide what the computer has to do next.
The first time if I press the Shift key during the early boot stage, and the second time directly after I have entered my user name at the login screen: The mouse pointer appears - and in the bar at the bottom of the screen I can choose which keyboard type, system language and type of graphical user interface I want to use. One of them - that saved me one time when using an early alpha version of Ubuntu when on holiday and far away from the next internet access point - is "gnome (save mode)".

Are the packages gnome-session and gnome-session-bin installed?
If unsure you can try

sudo apt-get install gnome-session gnome-session-bin

I dual boot with XP, so the grub loader offers the choice of a couple of Ubuntu variants or the windows loader. When I select Ubuntu it commences to load the system from the hard drive, and then goes to the desktop wall paper and nothing further happens. As I can access the virtual console and have confirmed the correct packages are in place I presume the system installed correctly. There are no options to select anything, even when pressing the space bar during boot. I checked and the latest gnome-session packages are already installed.

i had the exactly the same issue on my toshiba netbook.
Since my lucid was a quite new install (only two weeks) I decided to wipe it completely and start from scratch. Plain install worked just fine,

Scrubbed it and did a clean install - that worked.