phil13
May 31st, 2011, 07:24 PM
Hi
Earlier today I was running ubuntu 10.10 (11.04 is incompatible with my dell latitude D520) fine. It probably hadn't been turned off for a fair while - just lots of hibernation. At some point I realised that whenever I tried to open firefox it appeared in the taskbar then closed immediately. I had a window open already which worked fine. Next I discovered that opening a terminal window did the same thing. So, I went into standby and out again to see if it fixed the problem. However, upon getting to the lock screen I could not type in my password as the box was just flashing as if it was opening then being killed instantly (much the same way terminal windows were).
One note is that this did seem to happen after I installed the latest set of updates (which did not require a restart).
So I hibernated and turned on again only to be met with the same problem (different shaped white box this time as per usual, also got the normal 'login' drum beat) . I used ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to the non-gui interface and could log in fine. I tried restarting at that point and ended up at the same screen.
I tried going into recovery mode, doing all the options there but without success. I've looked at various other threads, mostly for natty narwhal involving downgrading various libgtk files (time consuming having to type out the urls by hand as I look them up on a smartphone!!) but this was not successful. I've also tried reinstalling ubuntu-desktop and fiddling around with xorg. There was one fix that suggested replacing the xorg-config file but I don't have one, think it's to do with my drivers and the latest version of X.
Any suggestions? Currently using windows which is so slow! Fortunately not doing any programming at the moment, just exam revision.
If all else fails, I guess I can just backup and reinstall!
Thanks in advance for any help.
Earlier today I was running ubuntu 10.10 (11.04 is incompatible with my dell latitude D520) fine. It probably hadn't been turned off for a fair while - just lots of hibernation. At some point I realised that whenever I tried to open firefox it appeared in the taskbar then closed immediately. I had a window open already which worked fine. Next I discovered that opening a terminal window did the same thing. So, I went into standby and out again to see if it fixed the problem. However, upon getting to the lock screen I could not type in my password as the box was just flashing as if it was opening then being killed instantly (much the same way terminal windows were).
One note is that this did seem to happen after I installed the latest set of updates (which did not require a restart).
So I hibernated and turned on again only to be met with the same problem (different shaped white box this time as per usual, also got the normal 'login' drum beat) . I used ctrl+alt+f1 to switch to the non-gui interface and could log in fine. I tried restarting at that point and ended up at the same screen.
I tried going into recovery mode, doing all the options there but without success. I've looked at various other threads, mostly for natty narwhal involving downgrading various libgtk files (time consuming having to type out the urls by hand as I look them up on a smartphone!!) but this was not successful. I've also tried reinstalling ubuntu-desktop and fiddling around with xorg. There was one fix that suggested replacing the xorg-config file but I don't have one, think it's to do with my drivers and the latest version of X.
Any suggestions? Currently using windows which is so slow! Fortunately not doing any programming at the moment, just exam revision.
If all else fails, I guess I can just backup and reinstall!
Thanks in advance for any help.