GUI failed to display on boot

[nss000]

Gents: update:

Three uneventful, normal boots since the failure incident. Was it simply a cosmic-ray a "one-off" fluke?

Gents:

Running AMD965 system on UBUNTU_12.04: EVGA650 vidcard & DELL 24" monitor 1920x1200.

This is a what-happened, how do I look for clues and what if it happens again question??

No issues till this (Tues)mornings. On boot I ended up staring at a text-mode login screen, not the expected GUI. This legacy system has been rock-solid for years ... a few bad-sectors are reported on the (nearly empty 460-G) boot-drive, and weeks ago I installed the new well-rated Dell monitor. So I'm stuck at a text login screen.

Yes I am surprised. Never fear I entered usrnam and passwrd ... then STARTX. This command gets the multi-colored UBUNTU wallpaper, but no windows-manager/taskbars/icons/control-text. OH! Do something!

My cheat-sheet sez **ctrl-alt-F1**. I get 1/2 screen display of meaningless text messages ending w/o a prompt: Anyway I try **shutdown -h now** and nothing happens. I try **ctrl-alt-del** and the system reboots into ... the expected UBUNTU GUI login screen from which I can choose Gnome-Classic and all-appears well.

Hummm ... I immediately check *syslog* and *dmesg* looking for blobs of snarky error messages. I don't find them. Instead I find one (1) line in syslog = 'could not launch gdu-notification-daemon-desktop failed to execute child process...'

And one (1) line in dmesg = 'failed to spawn hydrid-gfx main process ...'

Have NOT rebooted the system since it came up OKey ... So what might have happened and what is a reasonable troubleshooting approach? Any comments appreciated.

 

[nss000]

Second occurrence: UBUNTU_12.04 fails to boot into GUI. All failure symptoms repeat, as does the "solution" of CLI login, STARTX fail followed by ctrl-alt-del.

There are many error messages displayed that flip-by too fast to read.

 

[skittle]

Maybe filesystem has more errors. Boot livecd and run "fsck -y"

 

[nss000]

BigS:

I understand I have the syntax option of : don't know if/how to make fsck function "verbose" and auto-repair.

sudo touch /forcefsck
shutdown -r now

 

[skittle]

How can it do fsck if the / partition is mounted?!

 

[nss000]

<rant/...../unrant> I have no idea.

 

[nss000]

BigS:

I understand I have the syntax option of : don't know if/how to make fsck function "verbose" and auto-repair.

sudo touch /forcefsck
shutdown -r now

 

[nss000]

More data: about 1/2 of all boots end in GUI and the other 1/2 at text CLI login. Didn't happen till the recent UBUNTU updates so I presume it's a Cannonical code blunder. Is this what a RACE condition looks like? Prolly take weeks to admit and weeks to fix.

I repeated a solution found elsewhere ... thus the phrase 'I understand.... ' was meant in the sence of ' I understand Frenchmen prefer cheeze with bread rather than women ...' It's common enough usage.