I know Ubuntu doesn't have it's own distro section, but it's a Debian distro sort of, so if this needs to be moved, that's fine.

Here's my problem...

I haven't the foggiest idea of what happened yesterday, but I'll give as good an explanation as I can...

I've got Ubuntu Linux on a dual boot XP/Linux Dell Inspiron 8600. No problems until yesterday.

I tried to log out and reboot yesterday and it didn't go as planned. When I go to log out, the options to reboot and restart are gone, for starters. So I log out, and I get to a root prompt and nothing else. I can't get anywhere by typing shutdown now or reboot or anything. The only thing I can do I type login and enter my password. Now it doesn't go anywhere except to another root prompt. Not the login screen or anything. I have to type startx to boot the machine.

This all started yesterday. What should I check for or do?

It looks like a setting has been altered, and Gnome has removed the restart shutdown options. I'm not sure where they are as I'm using KDE. but there usually in settings related to the Login Manager ( in your case probably gdm ).

The root prompt is the CLI and is capable of a lot of things, and some say even more powerful than X. to restart your machine, you'd type in there

shutdown -r now

To start your login manager type

gdm

startx does NOT boot the machine, it simply starts the X Windows system and GNOME. Your machine is booted, and quite capable.

So why do you think it suddenly started doing this? I don't think I altered anything knowingly... and how would I get it back to normal where the login manager comes up without having to type anything at the root prompt?

FIXED! Voila! I'm scaring mysefl with new found knowledge of the CLI. As a friend in another forum stated, CLI: Master It!

I reinstalled GDM. I have no idea how it got fubar'd but it did. Now I'm back to normal.

Thanks!