I accidentally closed terminal in the middle of an apt-get upgrade; am I screwed?

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket; That no go in "recovery mode" is unexpected.
OK ... Back up and regroup. Let's try a reversion prior to all the updates:
boot to grub, arrow down to an older kernel entry; enter to activate.
Will the older kernel boot up ?

poke'n to see

[Steve the Pocket]

It does not. It too freezes during the boot-progress screen.

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket;
By and large, your system is intact as the terminal is functional in all respects.
So looking at 2 scenes.
1, Reset the desktop;
2. (un)install the graphics drivers and (re)install.

So; What version are you running ?
and give the out put of terminal codes:

sudo lshw -C display
lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga

so we know what condition the condition is in and what we are hunting for.

moving right along

[Steve the Pocket]

lshw -C display yields:

description: VGA compatible controller
product: M98L [Mobility Radeon HD 4850]
vendor: Hynix Semiconductor (Hyundai Electronics)
physical id: 0
bus info: pci@0000:01:00.0
version: 00
width: 64 bits
clock: 33 MHz
capabilities: pm pciexpress msi vga_controller bus_master cap_list rom
configuration: driver=fglrx_pci latency=0
resources: irq:16 memory:d0000000-dfffffff memory:feaf0000-feafffff ioport:d000(size=256) memory:feac0000-feadffff

lspci -nnk | grep -iA3 vga spat out

01:00.0 VGA compatible controller [0300]: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI M98L [Mobility Radeon HD 4850] [1002:944a]
Subsystem: XFX Pine Group Inc. Device [16882:3000]
Kernel driver in use: fglrx_pci
Kernel modules: fglrx, radeon

(Man did that take a long time to type up on a tablet.)

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket ;

Welp. Card is recognized and a driver is loaded.Should workie, so why is it not - to beg the question.

Man you have not been typing all these responses ! ...Can you not copy and paste from your terminal directly into this thread (between code "#" tags) ???

Before delving deeper, how 'bout - on the off chance - a simple fix restores the desk top ? Need to know what version of ubuntu you are running .

still try'n

[Steve the Pocket]

Kubuntu 12.04 x64. Other than the video driver, everything was vanilla before the attempted update.

And I don't know my way around the terminal nearly well enough to copy the output of a command into a web forum post all from the shell. I don't even know how to use text-mode browsers.

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket;

Hey we were all green at one time, not knowing how is not a sin !

copy and paste( will work if Xserver is running);

Place the mouse cursor at the start of what you want to copy, hold the left mouse button down and drag the mouse to the end of what you want to copy. Release the mouse button; right click and choose "copy"// that copies the text to the clipboard.
In the open thread where you want the text "pasted" click on the "#" symbol at the top of the post and right click again and choose "paste". This will paste the contents of the clipboard between the "code tags" There also exist keyboard shortcuts to perform this operation.

Back on topic: Do this terminal command:

unity --reset

and see if that frees up your desk top. (copy/paste works the other way too ! from the thread to your terminal)
May need to reboot the computer to see the effect.

are we there yet ?

[Steve the Pocket]

Hang on. Were you under the impression that my GUI was functional? Because it's not; Kubuntu's recovery mode is ANSI-only (although oddly enough, it comes up with a custom font and a resolution that appears to be widescreen) with no mouse support; the menu is cursor-key driven and the shell comes up fullscreen. Hence why I've been accessing this forum from a tablet.

Oh, and Kubuntu uses KDE, not Unity.

[Bashing-om]

Steve the Pocket ;


Just goes to show my ignorance//my ubuntu "recovery mode" is functional// Oh well ..live and learn.

Kde:
if you restart Kwin (in Konsole) are there error messages?

 kwin --restart

hang'n in there

[steeldriver]

I wonder if your kernel got upgraded to a version that is incompatible with an installed proprietary fglrx driver?

http://wiki.cchtml.com/index.php/Hardware