It's been one heck of a day...

I just restarted my machine after getting my updates in Ubuntu, and now my graphics are gone... well... kind of.

Here's how a startup process works: I go into Grub, I pick my Ubuntu setup, and it starts loading normally. Then the screen goes black, it plays the catchy login jingle, and then it brings up two dialog boxes. One asking me for the keyring to my router and the other with the following message:

Weird thing is, I can still bring up windows by switching to TTY1, and starting apps in display :0.0. This screen dump shows how my environment looks now:

http://isharacomix.com/dev/errorpics/test.png

It seems to simply not want to access any of my config files, since the gnome-panel at the bottom is empty, and the gnome-panel at the top isn't even there. Plus, none of my themes are set, as you can see from the window manager.

It's a good thing I can still come to LQ for help, though. Does anyone have any idea what's going on here? If you need more info, just ask. If you need me to look up any configuration files, let me know where they are and I'll bring them up.

Thanks in advance for the help.

Oh yeah... When I was installing the updates, there was a broken package. It fixed itself, but apparently not well enough. I wish I could remember the name of it: it started with an X (which seems to make the source of the problem all the more evident).

Other issues:
* USB Flash Drive won't mount automatically
* Ubuntu hangs after shutdown command
* My /etc/X11/xorg.conf seems to have reset itself

The Gnome Power Manager is a component of GNOME; it can't be loaded correctly, and what happens then is that GNOME startup hangs right then and there, leaving you with a crippled environment.

Did you try using Synaptic? You can always try to (completely!) remove that package (it's a single one - no metapackages are affected), then log out, log in, check for any improvements, then - if it helps - reinstall, hoping for a fresh configuration. The package is really helpful on laptops, but not so important on desktops, anyway - you just lose the ability to easily configure power management (well, okay, it's pretty basic, and it's not trivial, but the machine should work without it).

Another way to track down the problem without digging trough most of your configuration files would be to use gconf-editor.

M.

Thanks for the reply. I've already reinstalled my whole system (I decided that would be easier), but I'm still curious about the problems.

I did use Synaptic and I did reinstall the power manager. The desktop was still crippled, but the mess-up dialog box stopped showing up. I also tried reinstalling all sorts of other programs (gnome-toolbar, nautilus, etc), and I slowly got a partial desktop environment back, but it still failed to load most of the necessary problems.

I also looked at the gconf-editor table, but it was just showing me what all of my setup was supposed to look like. I saw all of my preferences, but none of them were being adhered to.

Something else random: I ran gnome-session manually, and it said there was a timeout while trying to load the desktop environment, if that helps.

I've been digging around in another forum, but without success up to now - we've had similar issues that were fixed by just deleting something (a config file) that got botched, so that it was recreated in a way that worked.

The gnome-session thing's actually (or most likely, rather) the "seize up" I suspected - at least as far as one can be sure without actually sitting in front of the machine in question.

I guess it'd need another similar event to investigate - but since you've solved it for now, I don't think you'll be keen on reiterating

M.

The package is really helpful on laptops, but not so important on desktops, anyway - you just lose the ability to easily configure power management