I tried the upgrade to Ubuntu 14.04.3 and now my computer has no desktop. I can't get a terminal but I can get to tty. I use the gnome-session-fallback, the 2D gnome ubuntu since my computer isn't the newest.

I tried sudo apt-get update, sudo apt-get install gnome, apt-get install gnome-session-fallback, almost anything with gnome except unity because my system can't support it.

Luckily for me my Firefox loads up, although much slower, since I had it as a Startup Application from before the upgrade.

I can't ALT-TAB so once I'm in tty, I can only reboot and wait a good 5-7 minutes for my computer to reboot.

Can anyone help.

Thanks.

Partition layout? (fdisk -l?)
What says /var/log/Xorg.0.log?

You can also try to install 14.0.4.3 from scartch.

fdisk -l

/dev/sda1 *
/dev/sda2
/dev/sda5

Xorg.log:

http://paste.ubuntu.com/12030760

Is the output of fdisk -l really as shown above?

Xorg.0.log shows no errors.

Sorry, no.

Boot Id
/dev/sda1 * 83 Linux
/dev/sda2 5 Extended
/dev/sda5 82 Linux swap/solaris

You should consider making a backup of your data.
Then reinstallation of the OS.

I don't have a disk nor can I burn one?

Can I upgrade/downgrade from tty?

Which Ubuntu release are you trying to upgrade FROM? Which specific method did you use to try to upgrade?

Like yancek asked: Which Ubuntu release are you trying to upgrade from?


'apt-get update' installs packages with a new minor version. Who told you to install GNOME and such packages? Because they should be there already, shouldn't they?.. To upgrade to a new desktop user distribution release use 'apt-get dist-upgrade'. Before you do the latter it would be good to check if 'apt-get update' shows errors.


What are the hardware specs of your machine?
How do you know your machine doesn't support Unity?
What does this return (requires 'apt-get install unity'):

Check if you can access a terminal with the CTRL+ALT+Fn key combo where n is a number between 1 and 8. From there try to run any app with something like:
Another way would be to boot not into runlevel 5 (which traditionally started the X Server) but runlevel 3 (traditionally multi-user, networked command line access).


First of all I question reinstalling an OS without more troubleshooting. Now you don't know what's going on and what went wrong. On the other hand if you don't want to know then by all means... If you can't burn a disk you could see if you can get the network installation ISO (smallest version) onto an USB stick?