[ale] Ubuntu upgrade

[David Tomaschik]

On 07/04/2010 09:19 PM, drifter wrote:
> Still fighting this and having problems as my Linux background (shallow as 
> it is) is Red Hat, not Debian.
>
> This netbook upgraded to Ubuntu 10.04 LTS.
> It starts up in runlevel 3 -- at least that's what I think it is.
> All I get is a (root) prompt. if I type "startx" [Ent] after logging in, 
> the hard drive churns for a few seconds and my desktop appears.
> There is no /etc/inittab file.
>
> Ubuntu is >supposed< to be the "easy to use" Linux distro that doesn't
> do STUPID things like this.  Anyone coming from Windoze would have no
> clue what was wrong or how to fix it.
>
> I, at least, know that somewhere I have to add the command "startx."
> I just do not know what file I need to edit, or where it might be hidden.
> It doesn't seem to be in /boot or /boot/grub.
>
> Sean
>
> PS  The file /boot/grub/menu.lst has the following after the list
> of default options:
>
> title       Ubuntu 10.04 LTS, kernel 2.6.32-23-generic
> uuid       1866e268-96e3-4aaf-b727-b66140d931a3
> kernel   /vmlinuz-2.6.32-23-generic root=UUID=99b3c22....ro
> quiet splash
> initrd     /initrd.img-2.6.32.23-generic
> quiet
>
> This is followed by the same kernel (recovery mode) followed by four more
> pairs of kernel entries ending up with 2.6.28-15.
> Should the last line in the block above be "startx"?
>
>   
Does it say anything above the root prompt?  I rather suspect that
something is erroring and aborting the boot. If it's giving you a root
prompt with no login, that means it's dropping you into single-user
mode, which is triggered either by an error during the boot or by the
line "single" being appended to the kernel arguments.

You don't really want startx anywhere -- init loads the services
requested by the current run environment, and one of those (for
Gnome-based "vanilla" Ubuntu) is gdm.  GDM will load X and provide you
with the login screen you're used to.

Menu.lst is not a shell script, so putting startx there will likely only
make things worse -- and certainly won't get X going for you.

--
David Tomaschik, RHCE
Ubuntu Community Member
Moderator, LinuxQuestions.org
GPG: 0x6D428695

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