Given it’s taken me a while to sort this I thought I’d write down what I did in case it helps someone else (it might help me again in the future too, I’m sure if it happens again I won’t remember what I did to fix it)
So yesterday I installed VirtualBox 2.0, removed VirtualBox 1.5.x OSE and its related dependencies, and probably installed a whole load of updates too – I really can’t remember exactly what I did – at the time it all worked fine but after I switched the machine back on today and logged in I don’t see my desktop just a white screen and the mouse cursor.
Hitting ctrl-alt-F1 gets me to a command shell, so the machine hasn’t locked up.
From struggling to get my ATI based card to work in the past I know that dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org reverts X to a very basic configuration so I tried that from the shell and then rebooted. dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org obviously had an effect as the screen resolution of the login screen dropped down but I still got the white screen.
Rebooting again and choosing the recovery option from the bootloader prompt I chose the “Try to fix X server” menu option – *try* to fix X – I like that although I didn’t find it funny at the time. Reboot, login in – still a white screen.
A Google search from another machine threw up suggestions to remove the likes of
~/.config/compiz
~/.gconf/apps/compiz
This didn’t help either, but thinking about it it may have done if I’d gone about things differently. X obviously isn’t completely broken as you can get the login screen and a safe session (see later) also works fully. I think only removing the above directories (i.e. not doing any of the above dpkg-reconfigure etc stuff) may have worked if I’d been in safe mode when I removed them, as it was X was running and I used ctrl-alt-F1 to get a shell. I suspect that when I issued the reboot command and X shut down it just rewrote the files with the same values in them.
Finally I stumbled on a blog post. I did something similar, logged in using a “Gnome FailSafe” session, reinstalled the ATI drivers – I just downloaded them from http://ati.amd.com/support/drivers/linux/linux-radeon.html rather than using EnvyNG – and re-enabled the proprietary drivers under “System -> Administration -> Hardware Drivers” menu (which if I hadn’t run dpkg-reconfigure xserver-org in the first place I might not have needed to do), rebooted and everything was ok.
If nothing else a “Gnome FailSafe” session is your friend, at least you can get online to find answers.
Thank you very much! I have had the same problem after I ran “sudo gem update –system”. I was so sorrow with it but I can fix thanks to your instruction, many thanks
for me the problem appears while upgrade my distribution. i had thinking change the driver to “vesa” for do installation but i m not sure if it ll work!!