9.10 No gui after installing 2nd display pkg and relog in

[mehanai]

I'm a comp systems engineering student who's been running ubuntu on one of my machines for about a year and can do basic command line stuff but I'm stumped.

I tried to hook a 2nd monitor up and ubuntu said it needed to install a pkg so I let it and then it said to re log in, I did. It now comes up acting like a terminal instead of a gui. I rebooted a bunch of times loading the old system snapshots (pressing esc during boot) and got kernel 2.6.28-15-generic to boot with normally which was great.

But the only mouse that worked was the little button one in the middle of the keyboard and there was no sound and a couple of other funny things. Being more used to windows still I figured I'd reboot it from the same kernel and see if that fixed it. Now all of my kernel images act like the 2.6.31-19-generic one and only boot command line.

I spent about 6 hours trying every command I could find in the man and help pages and consistently got three errors:

1: failed to load apparmor

2: Failed to fetch http://us.archive.ubuntu.com/ubuntu/dists/karmic- ... with about 30 different endings followed by
Temporary failure resolving ' *.ubuntu.com'

3: RuntimeError: could not open display

I do not have a cd drive on that machine so it's rather difficult to just reinstall off a live cd
Thanks

[stlsaint]

1) Make sure system has internet connectivity
2) At grub boot into recovery mode
a. Attempt to repair startup issues from recovery menu
3) What type of video driver do you have?

You may need to just reinstall ubuntu-desktop.
Also this may help: Dual Monitor

[mehanai]

I don't know how to test the internet connectivity from command line. ping www.google.com returns unkown host.

I can no longer get to recovery mode they all boot to terminal. I tried that initially and it just returned without doing anything that caused outputs.

I don't know what video driver I have other than its played games and online video from ubuntu without problem for over a year until i decided to plug in a 2nd monitor. Its an old dell latitude d400 that has a sticker saying designed for xp on it, and update manager installs all the important updates it wants about once a month.