When starting my computer, it doesn't start gnome, just goes to terminal

[thebrotherofasis]

Hello,

Last night I turned off my ubuntu 7.10 machine, and went to have a comfortable night's sleep. This morning, I woke up and turned it on to start a day of work... and wooops!!! After loading the initial stages, ubuntu just doesn't go to gnome... it goes to the terminal and asks me for my username and password. I provide them, and it just stays in the terminal!

I am utterly confused... everything was perfect yesterday, and today... I just can access the terminal. I have restarted my machine many times already, and I just get to the same point.

What could be wrong?

And most importantly: how can I get back to where I was before...? How can I just login to my gnome session and work as I have been doing on a normal basis?

This is surprising, and kind of annoying to say the truth.

I had to start in windows, and I am writing from here... It's been ages since I last used windows... everything I have is in ubuntu... so please, if anyone can shed some light on this issue, it would be very grateful

Thank you for your kind support.

[Cannaregio]

What happens if you type in your terminal
startx
does the GUI start or not?

And what happens if you, instead, press the three keys
CTRL+ALT+F7
do you get your GUI?

[thebrotherofasis]

1) I typed startx, and I get the following error:

Giving up
xinit: connection refused (errno 111): unable to connect to X server
xinit: no such process (errno 3): server error

2) I held CTRL+ALT+F7 and nothing happens...

Is this serious? How can I get my GUI back to work?

Thanks in advance

[markjensen]

Sounds like something was changed in your X configuration during last boot session, so when you rebooted, it took effect, but is non-functional. Have you set or removed any desktop effect options recently?

[thebrotherofasis]

Well... I hardly can think of something I changed: My screen resolution... However after I canged it, it was working perfectly. But I didn't change it yesterday, nor any time recently, probably a week ago at the soonest.

No desktop effects I have touched, for I prefer a better performance over apperiance. Now, is there a way in which I can reconfigure the X configuration?, or what should be done instead?

[markjensen]

Well, you can manually browse and check for a backup xorg.conf file in your /etc/X11/ directory. It may have a .backup appended, or likely a tilde (~) if it was edited.

If a backup exists, and the problem was with your xorg.conf, then this will fix you right back up.

If you want to reconfigure yourself, sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg should get the process started.