Ten years on Linux and this has me stumped.
So I'm putting it in the Newbie thread.

I pulled an Nvidia card out of my box: I suspected a hardware failure with that.

The gear on the motherboard is Intel. An Intel driver is present, and it seems - judging from the logs - to be loading.

I commented out a lot of xorg.conf. There were things in there to help me get my resolution right.
Gone now, but I purged the Nvidia driver anyway.
( sudo apt-get remove --purge nvidia )

But I have no GUI.
The login screen appears as expected, mouse and keyboard work.
But when I log into the GUI I get only wallpaper, no menus nor bars nor buttons, nor anything on a right-click.

FWIW I had been using Metacity until now, rather than the latest Gnome desktop.

A CD-bootable Ubuntu still works fine in this box tonight: that makes me suppose I have eliminated any hardware problems.

Any tips would be gratefully accepted.

I think I have seen advice suggesting that a person should just delete lots of desktop config files in a situation such as this. But to me that seems wrong - or maybe hasty.

So I thought I'd ask first.

Many thanks for any help.

Maybe removing the nVIDIA driver removed Gallium as well. Don't know off hand how to reinstall that.

Thanks YouHateWindows.

I have never before heard of Gallium.
Is it a Gnome thing? I am new to Gnome.

At present I would be happy if I could fire up anything that even faintly resembles a desk-top GUI...

Hi...

No, It's software that helps with 3D acceleration. Please see here, as well.

Would you open a terminal and post the output of these two commands? I'm not sure if I can help with this but it might give myself and others more to work with...

Thanks!

Obviously if you installed the nvidia driver then you also created an xorg.conf file. Try renaming xorg.conf to xorg.conf.old.

It's just one thing after another: the keyboard layout is wrong. I can't find a pipe character to use on the command line. Output just scrolls away...

I'll look into that.

Thanks Eddy.

Looks like the system already did something there.
There is no xorg.conf any more, only xorg.conf~ - and some back-ups, and the failsafe.

Still no pipe, but output I can see from lsmod includes i915, which I take to be the Intel driver.

I tried booting into the other desktop, Compiz, just in case the problems were only in the Metacity files. No luck there neither.

Update: not exactly solved, but I have a low resolution Metacity desktop going (after updating everything).

There's still a video problem but at least I can now look into it.

Thanks people.

You're welcome, hope you can get it resolved.

Regards...