Black screen on boot.
 

I wanted to have the Nook ereader software on my laptop, so I started exploring how to make that happen. One option was the Wine Windows emulator. I can't remember if I installed Wine or not, but I did discover that I could get to my Nook books via the Barnes and Noble web site and so abandoned that project. The next day, when I started my Dell Latitude D410, instead of giving me the usual desktop with the program icons down the left side of the screen, all I got was a black screen. I had updated to 12.04 myself, which I did because the previous owner of my machine had failed to update for so long I could not update directly to 14.04. I thought maybe updating to 14.04 would solve the problem, so I did that, but no change. I have typed variations on "ubuntu black screen" as a Google search to look for solutions, but they often refer to problems with installing Nvidia graphics cards. I have not installed any new cards on this computer, indeed have not altered the hardware at all. I'm stumped. I chose to buy a used laptop with Ubuntu on it because it was cheap and because I figured I could learn Linux this way, but most discussions assume a level of knowledge that I do not have, not only about Linux, but about computers in general. Please help, and please feel free to email me at my personal email address, which I think is available here.

Thanks.

Do you see anything? Like a command prompt? If so, perhaps typing in the command "startx" would do something. If it boots into something that is totally black without even a command prompt, maybe try taking the second boot option underneath the default option when you're first booting in (this is known as "recovery mode"). See image below for an example of what I'm talking about. In this image the default option is "Ubuntu" and the second option is below it entitled "Advanced options for Ubuntu" -- your screen might show slightly different options. Regardless, take the second option below the first. This will give you a command prompt, which will give you an opportunity to try some things.

If "startx" does nothing, then perhaps the issue is a problem with the update to grub2 from grub ("grub" being the program that boots into Ubuntu -- it stands for "GNU GRand Unified Bootloader"). So, if you can get a command prompt (meaning, if there is some text such as user@yourcomputer:~$ after which you type in commands), then try the following command: "sudo update-grub". To summarize, here are the two commands I suggest trying first (if you can get a command prompt):

if that does nothing, then try this:

I could be completely wrong, but look very carefully at your display from all angles -- it may be that the backlight is off and just seems to be a black screen. I'm providing that answere from experience with a different Dell with Intel graphics. If you do find this to be true, there are solutions online dealing with grub and a video mode switch. This was too long ago for me to remember exactly.