Unbelievably, this morning, I booted Kubuntu, expecting to see KDE promptly thereafter. Is that really what happened? Yes, eventually, but read on.

The odd thing is that X decided to crash twice first. Thats not earthshattering: X crashes all the time if mistakes are made in configuring it. The strange thing is that during the two crashes, I made absolutely no changes at all. None. The third time, it started for absolutely no reason at all.

So, I'm forced to conclude that X simply crashed. There is no rhyme or reason it to it, it just failed. Linux held up, as you might expect, but isn't X supposed to be very stable as well?

Okay, enough about that. The main point for the post would be: why would X crash twice in a row for no apparent reason, and how would I avoid it in the future?

What did your syslogs say?

I only checked the X error logs. It appears that logs for both the crashing and working server were almost the same, except

was missing at the end.

Anyways, whatever strange problem may have occured, it seems to be over now. Hopefully, it won't happen again.

Something may have happened to your installation. Just reinstall X. That'll probably fix you up.

You also should run fsck on your HD. You could have a file system problem.

It happened again today, unfortunately. Is Kubuntu simply unstable?

jiml8, I will try reinstalling X.

Not necessarily Kubuntu; in fact, it probably isn't.

You might have a hardware fault. A problem with your HD or the HD controller or cable would cause this kind of problem.

I've never had this kind of problem before, however, not even with Debian set up on the same hard drives. I'd say X crashes once every twenty or so bootups, so far. Are you sure that's what it is?

Actually, I have some more evidence to (possibly) prove against that and that is whenever it crashes, it says that there was one failure since last login. This leads me to believe that there may be a problem with it.

Never mind; enough blaming the software, that won't solve anything. When Kubuntu says there was failure (at the CLI at startup) since the last login, where should I look to find the cause? A quick glance through my /var/log directory found nothing of interest; except a failog (faillog?) that I couldn't access. It was a binary file. In addition, I might have overlooked something. Where would be the best place to look in such a case?

Of course I'm not sure. I am not sitting in front of your machine and evaluating it.

What does it say in your /var/log/Xorg.log (or Xfree86.log depending on what you are using)? What does it say in dmesg?

Have you taken a look at your default console (ctrl-alt-F1)? Often interesting things appear there.

I have removed Linux from my system, so no more help is needed. I suspect the problem to be upgrading; since the problems began occur many times as often after I did a full apt upgrade the second time. Thank you for you efforts.