Upgrade 8.04-->10.04 gives black screen with **NO WINDOWS** message
 

Was running Server 8.04 with graphical desktop - no problems. Wanted to upgrade to 10.04, so ran sudo do-release-upgrade --proposed

Upgrade was successful (although so much stuff scrolled by, it's hard to tell if something errored along the way).

Server rebooted and a dark maroon screen said 10.4 is booting, ntp service started etc. and a scrolling series of dots.

Then got a sky blue patterned login screen, so I logged in. Screen then went black, with a movable mouse pointer.

If I do Alt-Tab a panel pops up saying ** NO WINDOWS **

Using Ctrl-Alt-F1 (iirc) got me a command prompt, so I logged in there and ran: startx

This gives me the message:

Fatal server error:
Server is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock and start again

So checked runlevel (who -r) and that was set to 2. Changed /etc/init/rc-sysinit.conf so RUNLEVEL=5

Rebooted, logged in again, still got black screen + mouse, and **NO WINDOWS**. Logged into terminal and runlevel=5.

Also tried running dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg but that returns immediately without anything apparently happening(?).

Any ideas please on how I can get my KDE graphical environment back up ?

Many thanks

Suddenly wondered whether the upgrade process is not intelligent enough to upgrade existing non-server packages, e.g. kde?

So tried installing kde-core, but it says it can't find a package by that name.

Any ideas?

I know you are supposed to be able to "upgrade" from 8.04 to 10.04, but I don't know anyone who has managed this without problems (maybe they just stay silent?)

8.04 used KDE 3.x 10.04 is using KDE4.x - there's a huge difference between them.

But you can still boot, and get a login, which is good news.

I suggest you make a backup of /home + anything else you need (Eg /var/www - you don't specify what sort of "server" this is) to an ext3 formatted external HDD, do a clean install of 10.04, apply the updates, then restore your data.

Off topic: You might not like KDE4 (I hate it, and have switched to gnome).

Not the best way to spend a sunny weekend, I know, but maybe someone else has a better idea.

Meanwhile, I hope you took a backup before you ran sudo do-release-upgrade --proposed in which case I suggest you restore it while you consider your options.

HTH

Never did get to the bottom of this. So after much tinkering I finally went for the clean install & data restore :0(

Thanks for the follow-up.

You don't say if it worked for you, but, as you are not complaining, I'm assuming it has :)

One last piece of advice: don't delete your old backup of /home for a couple of weeks, there may be something you have forgotten about, that you'll want to go back to later.

Clean Install
 

I had the same issue. I tried many different ways to get around it with not much luck. So I ended up saving everything and did an old fashion clean install from a USB as well...