[juneau-lug] Re: problem loading gui

  • From: James Zuelow <e5z8652@xxxxxxxxxx>
  • To: juneau-lug@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
  • Date: Wed, 20 Oct 2010 07:10:40 -0800

On Tuesday, October 19, 2010, Larry Hurlock wrote:
> background:  doing my 2nd Ubuntu upgrade
> method:  used the Update module's choice of "Upgrade to 10.10" to download
> and do installs
> 
> It seemed to go well, but when it fired back up, I was at a terminal
> prompt, not the Gnome gui I expected.  I have authorization at the prompt,
> but am stuck for what to enter to bring the Gnome interface back up.
> 
> Everything is present, I'm sure.  I checked using the "dir" command and a
> few other limited ones I know, but would appreciate a little push here.
> 
> Thanks,
> 
> Larry Hurlock
> 
It sounds as if the X server isn't starting up, dropping you to the shell.  
There are a variety of things that can go wrong. If a quick Google doesn't 
come up with a fix like "oh, for 10.10 you need to apt-get install widget-foo" 
then take a peek at some files.

Here is what I would do on my system:

First off, move any xorg.conf file out of the way and reboot.  You may not 
have an xorg.conf file.

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.backup

If that clears it up, then there was a driver rename or something similar 
between 10.04 and 10.10.

If that didn't work, or you didn't have an xorg.conf to begin with, take a 
look at /var/log/Xorg.0.log and see if there is an error you can Google.  The 
first thing to look for is the date/time stamp on the file:

ls -l /var/log/Xorg.0.log

If the date/time stamp isn't just after you last booted the computer, then X 
isn't starting at all.  If that's the case we'll have to investigate why.  
(Missing packages, etc.)

If the timestamp is good, open the file with less and look for error messages:

less /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Less uses vim syntax, press q to quit the program.  You can search for errors 
by typing

/EE

When you hit enter, it should take you to the first occurrence of two capital 
E's in the file, which hopefully is a line saying (EE).

Then just keeping typing slash-enter "/" to go to the next line.

If nothing stands out, search for WW "/WW" which are warning lines.

If there's still nothing that speaks to you or is Googleable get back to us 
with the output of

cat /var/log/Xorg.0.log | egrep "\(EE\)|\(WW\)"

James
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