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Running a clean machine, purchased from System76 in mid May 2014, with Ubuntu 14.04 LTS installed.

Being an ex Windows user I am used to spending a lot of time keeping my machine tight. I clean and update like crazy, and I brought that habit to my new Linux machine as I want things to stay good. So, every morning I run six update commands: dist-upgrade, upgrade, update, autoremove, autoclean, & check, and then I run them all again (because I've noticed things are sometimes different the second time around). I have aliased these so I only type one letter (u) and my password, and those six commands run, twice. Also, once a week I use bleach bit in both regular and super user modes, and I haven't checked all those boxes, just what I think are the safe ones. I have been doing this for a while now and everything has been good. I have even run these commands since I lost my GUI and I get no error messages. Everything seems to be well.

I have only downloaded a small number of things not from the software center: Google Earth, Google Chrome, and a couple of other small things that I forget what they are but those were quite a while ago and have given me no problems that I can detect.

I work hard to keep this box in a good clean condition.

So, this last Saturday morning (February 28) I fire my baby up and I got no GUI. What? The rest of the machine works. I'm writing this in one of those other shells (CTRL ALT F1).

I have looked over a number of the other questions found by searching for "Lost GUI Ubuntu 14.04" and they all seem to be for other circumstances, speciality cases, unless of course I missed something. In my case, I had it fresh from the factory, all has worked well for well over six months and then, all of a sudden, poof! It's gone!

So, I don't know what to think really. I don't think any of my hardware died. I wouldn't think any of those updating commands or bleach bit would have done anything bad.

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  • Try typing startx & see if the error messages are helpful.
    – Mark Williams
    Mar 2, 2015 at 0:08
  • Not about your problem but about updating: Run update first (gets new list of available packages), then dist-upgrade (installs available software updates and does the same plus a little bit more as upgrade). Then you can run autoremove, autoclean, clean and check if you want, but they are not that important that they have to be run every day. If you follow this order (update, (dist-)upgrade, [if you want: autoremove, autoclean, clean, check]), you don't have to launch that bunch twice.
    – Byte Commander ♦
    Mar 2, 2015 at 0:16
  • Hi @MarkWilliams Thank you. I tried that but with no success. It ran some stuff to fast for me to see and then just sat there as if a process was running. So I hit CTRL-C to get out and it told me something like the process had been stopped.
    – ReyKev
    Mar 3, 2015 at 18:47
  • Hi @ByteCommander Thank you. I will change the order of my updates. Thanks again.
    – ReyKev
    Mar 3, 2015 at 18:48

1 Answer 1

Reset to default
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So I got a hold of the manufacturer of my machine, System76, and they figured it out for me. Turned out it was a bad .config file in my home directory. So we renamed the .config directory .config.bak.

Reboot the machine and I'm good. I had to rework some of my configurations for the launch bar and such, but I got my system back and in my own account.

All is well. Thanks System 76!

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