I recently (about two weeks ago) installed Linux Mint 17 (32 bit) on an old Dell Inspiron E1405, and it's worked without issue (except some errors with my Broadcom WiFi card, but that's to be expected).

The thing is that I closed my laptop last night (it wasn't bugging out, I was just going to bed) and about maybe two hours ago, I opened the laptop to use GIMP. I hadn't shut the laptop down, and the clock screen showed up normally. However, after mouse movement, the login box didn't appear. I waited maybe ten minutes, but nothing loaded so I shut down the laptop.

It worked normally on reboot up until the login screen. I logged in as usual and the screen that was supposed to be my desktop was simply a black screen with a movable cursor.

After pressing Ctrl + Alt + Fx, it took me to terminal. I logged in fine and tried several commands to no avail, including:

The result being the black screen again.

That took me to the black screen as well.

I tried installing the gnome desktop but there was an error message in terminal, so no luck there.

Any suggestions? I would much rather not have to reinstall. That would involve more Broadcom issues.

A bit of a long shot, but what if you create a new user (just to test) and login to that account. Does the desktop appear for that new user? sometimes it's just a question of some config file someplace getting corrupted, and it hangs things up, so start with a fresh user and see if things work. If so, you know that you can fix your actual user's account by combing through some ~/.config files.

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Ah, no. Same issue with a new user.

OK, how about installing something really really simple, like fluxbox? if X can't render cinnamon for ..some reason.. maybe it can do fluxbox.

If that fails, then it has to be an issue with Xorg... although I'm not sure what yet.
What does /var/log/Xorg.0.log say?

maestoso-MXC053 maestoso # chmod u+x /var/log/Xorg.0.log
maestoso-MXC053 maestoso # /var/log/Xorg.0.log
bash: /var/log/Xorg.0.log: Text file busy
maestoso-MXC053 maestoso # sudo /var/log/Xorg.0.log
sudo: unable to execute /var/log/Xorg.0.log: Text file busy

Sorry I meant for you to cat Xorg log:

Should I just post the last line? If so,

Most of the lines aren't visible.

What I can see:

http://i.imgur.com/vAJle3h.jpg

Ctrl-Alt-f6?

Ctrl + Alt + F(1-6) takes me to a terminal. F7 takes me to the black cursor screen and the rest do nothing.

That line:

[ 105.996] (II) AIGLX: Suspending AIGLX clients for VT switch

Does suggest that perhaps there is an issue with the video driver, because AIGLX is the open source AMD driver.

Can you try to reinstall the GPU driver? It will probably tell you that it is already installed, so force a re-install. A general system update might help, too, just in case your kernel and GPU drivers are out of sync.

You might also try deleting .Xauthority, .xinitrc, and other .X* files from your user directory.

My WiFi isn't working on the laptop again. Well great.

So how exactly would I reinstall the GPU? Haven't found anything useful on Google.

sudo aptitude purge xserver-xorg-video-radeon
sudo aptitude install xserver-xorg-video-radeon

Well shoot.

Back at square one here.

It can't get the necessary files from the ftp site because of the lack of working WiFi. So I can't reinstall.