Karmic boots to terminal. How do I get to desktop?

[JoJerome]

Just installed Karmic on a Compaq laptop. Install went beautifully. Had to tweak the wifi and nVidia drivers, but no biggie. Lots of restarting, shutting down/turning on, no problems. Now all of a sudden:

1) When the laptop lid is closed it boots only to a grub> command line. I seem to have fixed that issue using instructions in:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Grub2#Rescue Mode

Got the desktop back albeit with everything normally on the right of the start panel crammed to the left and open windows not showing in the start panel. But before I can fix that and the closing-laptop-without-inciting-the-wrath-of-the-bootsector thing...

2) Now when I boot up it boots only to the command prompt. All seems fine with the $~ command prompt, but it frightens my barely-knows-computers former Windows user I'm converting with this laptop. How do I get back to the desktop? And get it to boot to desktop?

So far, what doesn't work:
exit
startx ("No screens found")
start kdm (a plethora of error messages)
kdm start
alt+f1-f7.

Again, the command line seems nicely intact. Could it be a simple task of looking for and reinstalling missing files? How do I do that?

Thanks in advance!

[saikee]

Haven't fixed such a problem for a long time as the distros are a lot more capable nowadays.

Would suggest you post the /var/log/Xorg.0.log

It can happen in some distros that if the system is aborted xorg would switch to another setting rendering the X window no long displayable.

The /etc/X/xorg.cfg is the configuration file but since Ubuntu uses the short version I have had to do anything.

You could potentially run the Live CD. If the X window works alright, locate its /etc/X/xorg.cfg and copy it to the same directory of your Karmic partition. It is cutting corner but it saves time.

[leonpmu]

The error that you are getting with no screens found is that you must look in your xorg.conf file for the entries regarding screen, maybe look at your xorg.conf.old file for what the info was regarding the screen and put it in the new xorg.conf.

Cheers

[JoJerome]

Would suggest you post the /var/log/Xorg.0.log


Actually, that too gave me error messages.

Working with a couple of people over on UbuntuForums.org I/we finally figured it out. When I first installed Karmic several days ago and got impatient installing nVidia drivers I managed to install two competing versions. The not-booting-to-desktop was apparently Linux's way of telling me, "Make up your mind dork."

I got help removing the version I didn't want and all is now right with the universe.

Thank you though - I learn TONS when troubleshooting problems like these! Things like following my own advice to the user about "Don't just arbitrarily start installing things because they sound right."

[shazlovely]

Quote:
Originally Posted by firewiz87 View Post
Do the following:
1. Set the BIOS boot order such that the hard disk "sdc" (the third HDD) gets first priority.
2. Create (add) an entry as follows in grub.cfg:

Code:

menuentry "Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (on /dev/sdb1)" {
set root=(hd1,1)
chainloader +1
}

Try booting to this entry n let me know what happens.

By the way if u didnt explicitly set the mappings how/from where did you list it in post #1??
1. The boot order has /dev/sdc as the first in order. The BIOS calls /dev/sdc SCSI-0, /dev/sdb Ch0-M, and /dev/sda Ch0-S

2. Created an entry as detailed above in etc/grub.d, called it "50_addxp" and chmodded it. When selected in the GRUB 2 menu it returns "error, no such partition.

I got the device map listings by looking in /boot/grub/device.map



==============================
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[shazlovely]

I don't think it helps much - it's pretty much the same as the last (original) grub menu, as far as the disk configurations go.

Obviously GRUB 2 counts disks and partitions diferently, but that's what the OS-Prober is for!!

I would generally tidy this file up, and get rid of all the extraneous stuff, but I'll leave this one, I cbf.

I've also configured the update process to not sequence - it will need to be manually edited for kernel updates etc.



======================================
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