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I hit accept in the upgrade packages dialogue window, locked my screen, and went to a meeting. When I came back after an hour, I couldn't get the screens to light up, and so eventually I rebooted the machine using the power button. It rebooted into text mode.

Upon checking, the packages hadn't upgraded. There was a new kernel in the list, so I thought "why not" and upgraded them all from the shell. Didn't help; still booting in text mode. I have kernels 3.13.0-44, 43, and 32 installed.

ctrl-alt-f7 just gives me the message that apache2 didn't start within 20 seconds. who -r tells me that I'm in run-level 2. startx isn't doing it - says xinit is unable to connect to the x xerver.

I commented out the GRUB_HIDDEN_TIMEOUT=0 line in /etc/default/grub to get the boot menu (holding down shift keys etc wasn't working). For a single boot in recovery mode on the newest kernel, I could boot to graphical login and desktop environment, but my dual screens had lost their configuration. I reconfigured and rebooted to see if it would stick, but now every boot menu option boots to text mode (including the recovery ones). Oddly, unless I'm booting in recovery mode, the normal boot isn't verbose - it just shows a black screen until I get the login prompt.

The graphics card is an ATI, configured using amdcccle.

Any ideas on how I can get my graphical login and desktop back?

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  • Have you tried to reinstall the xserver apt-get install --reinstall xorg? Jan 16, 2015 at 12:50
  • Yes, the xserver still won't output anything other than black screen. I have to Ctrl-Alt_F1 back to tty1, ctrl-c to kill the xserver (dies with return value 2, which isn't promising). I'm starting to wonder if it's fglrx.
    – Escher
    Jan 16, 2015 at 13:12
  • Doesn't seem to be fglrx; I did sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx-amdcccle fglrx-updates fglrx-amdcccle-updates and rebooted. Xserver still wouldn't display anything. (I reinstalled the drivers afterwards)
    – Escher
    Jan 16, 2015 at 13:39
  • Looking through /var/log/Xorg.1.log, I see fglrx: No matching device section for instance (BusID PCI:0@1:0:0) found, whereupon the backtrace log starts and ends with a seg fault and server aborting (which would explain it sitting around thinking for a while on boot, before presenting a text login screen). So I have a graphics driver problem, I take it?
    – Escher
    Jan 16, 2015 at 14:05
  • Disabled the ATI card in the BIOS, and then physically removed it. sudo apt-get remove --purge fglrx fglrx_* fglrx-amdcccle* fglrx-dev* and sudo apt-get remove --purge xserver-xorg xorg; sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg; sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg. Still getting black screen on startx, and I get a tiny white window terminal on xinit. So it's not the ATI driver (which remains uninstalled for the moment).
    – Escher
    Jan 16, 2015 at 16:31

1 Answer 1

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Gave up on fixing after every fix lead to the discovery of other odd, worrying problems (see comments stream). Took the graphics card out, and reinstalled the OS after finding that the xserver and lubuntu-desktop were gone, the ATI driver was spitting out seg faults.

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  • Don't forget to "accept" your own answer (click the little grey check-mark and it'll turn green)
    – Fabby
    Jan 27, 2015 at 9:23

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