unresponsive on boot
 

I have loaded Ubuntu onto my laptop as dual boot and have setup the displays. I have used it to search the web and copy some files from the Windows partition and everything worked fine. I did not shut down over night and this morning, there is nothing on either screen except my wallpaper and mouse cursor: no lonch pad, no title bar, nothing. I rebooted with the same USB drive into "Try Ubuntu without loading" and everything worked just fine. Then shut down; removed the USB drive; and rebooted using the installed dual boot. Nothing except wallpaper and mouse. This happened once before and I reinstalled.

What am I not doing?

Looks like a problem with your desktop environment (unity?)

Do you have automatic login?

Can you log out and on again? don't have stock ubuntu right here but I guess Crtl-alt-del offers you an option to log off..

Ott

Yes, I believe I have automatic login. I cannot logout; ctrl+alt+del does not do anything.
The mouse cursor moves but is otherwise unresponsive. The keyboard also seems to be unresponsive but I have not tried all key combinations :)

can you switch to console (ctrl-alt-f1)?

Would be nice to disable automatic login, you can do it from the usb disk but it is a bit of hassle in this way.

Yes, I can switch to a console using ctrl-alt-F1. I don't know what to do from there.

all right,
it means your system is fine, you have just f***d up the graphical user interface. You may try to move back to the graphical login (ctr-alt-f7 typically, sometimes f8 or f9). Sometimes even such a tiny digression to the console world helps.

You can also log in onto the console and do some troubleshooting.

* The first-best is to figure out what is wrong. However, if console is not your friend, you may try to do an easy hack, and try to log in again, possibly into another graphical environment. There are several options:

* For instance, you can kill your login and see whether you can login again.

I don't have stock ubuntu here. I bet your session runs under name 'gnome-session' in which case you should be able to kill it by

> killall gnome-session

if everything is right, you should have an option to log in again now.

* If it is not gnome-session... then again you have several options. Look for other sessions:
> ps ax|grep session
(this is lxsession in my case).

or kill lighdm, the login-manager. The effect should be the same but you need root privileges:
> sudo killall lighdm

Let us know how it is advancing.
Cheers,
Ott

Thank you! F1 took me to a console login; F7 returned me to the wallpaper with no launch bar or anything else; F8 & F9 returned black screens.

I logged in and killed my login with:
> killall gnome-session

That gave me the opportunity to enter my password which, after a few tense moments, returned me to a normal Ubuntu screen with the couple of changes I had made to the launch bar in previous sessions.

My question now is: how do I reinstate my automatic logon or do I have to repeat this process everytime I start Ubuntu?

I think your login is still configured to automatically log you in every time you reboot. I would recommend you to switch it off until the issue is fixed (it may just have been one-time glitch). Killing your crashed session from the console every time sounds like a bad idea ;-)

This link seems to be up-to-date and informs you about setting automatic login.

http://askubuntu.com/questions/51086...gin-in-lightdm

One more suggestion:
if this happens again, log into console and check the content of the file .xsession-errors in your home directory. It may hold hints about what went wrong.

You can view a file in console with
> more .xsession-errors

for instance.

Otoomet, I thank you for your suggestions. You have been very helpful but there must be something wrong with my source or with my computer. I wouldn't put it past Microsoft to have something in XP that screws with a Linux dual boot. Here's the rest of my story.

I switched off automatic login and then nothing worked. I could not get back to a graphical session and I don't know enough to manage from a terminal. Soooo.... I gave up and reinstalled.

That went fine. I set some things in System Settings (like dual monitor locations) and then updated. That took a long time and ended with the instruction to restart. When I restarted, it rebooted to the wallpaper & mouse pointer and nothing to click on.

Ctrl-Alt-F1 brought up a console login. Login brought me to the command line prompt. I looked at .xsession-errors with the following output:

init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd main process ended, respawning
init: at-spi2-registryd respawning too fast, stopped

I am at my wits end. I can't delete Windows XP because I have some programs that won't run under Linux. I would like to have Linux on my laptop because it is so much better with the programs that it runs but I don't know how to load a dual boot Ubuntu and have it work successfully. Maybe I should download my Ubuntu boot file from a different site and try again or order a CD and intalll from that. Any suggestions?

Never seen this message.

But the good news is that you can actually find quite a few posts on google now. For instance
http://http://askubuntu.com/question...l-installation
Has similar problems but fixes these by removing .Xauthority file in the home folder. Several users also report the problem to be realated to nvidia proprietary drivers.

Cheers,
Ott

Thanks for all your help. I completely reinstalled using Ubuntu 14.10. I thought I had the same problem but after awhile, the launch bar and menu bar appeared. It seems to be working fine if I am patient enough for it to get its act together. While I am waiting, there is a little activity on the disk light so my guess is that something is in process that has to finish before the boot is complete. I have ordered more RAM for my machine which I hope will help. I will also try to free some disk space, but I would think that 15 GB would be enough. If you have any more ideas, please let me know.

Good to hear it works.

I don't really have any ideas. 15G should be more than enough disk space. If you experience such hangings again, take a look at .xsession-errors. Maybe there is a hint. I suspect some sort of hardware-related misunderstanding.

You may also get familiar with other graphical environments in case those work better (gnome, mate, cinnamon, lxde, ...)

If it's graphics related then you might post your Xorg.log.old by pasting in code tags.

probably to late now but did you every try alt-F2 and unity-reset and/or if using compiz rm ~/.compiz-1 ~/.config/compiz-1 and reboot

http://www.webupd8.org/2012/10/how-t...in-ubuntu.html