graphical interface breaking

[kevindoyleie]

I installed 10.10 today and all was working well.
I was notified to install updates which I did.
After reboot, the login screen appears but every time I enter my user and password, it just re launches the log in screen.

Any one else having similar issues?

[kevindoyleie]

Re: graphical interface breaking

How can I revert back to before this mornings update without having to do a complete reinstall?

[3vi1]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Ctrl-alt-f1 to a console window and then you can look in /var/log for messages relating to the failure.

The first thing I would do is make sure your home dir has proper ownership/rights. A quick 'sudo chown -R yourid:yourid /home/yourid'. Might save you a lot of time.

[kevindoyleie]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Cheers for the help. I've done the chown command but I believe that the owenership was correct before that.
I don't see anything in the /var/log that is explaining it to me.

I've tried to update again from the command line but it doesn't fix the issue.

I can see that there is a fatal error when the machine is booting but the text is too big and obscured on the screen for me to make it out.
What I can see is:
modprobe: FATAL: /lib/modules/2.6.35-21-generic/modules.dep: No such file or directory

However I can see that file is there.

[GreyGeek]

Re: graphical interface breaking

You may have experienced an incomplete update and the error msg flew by too fast to see.

Open a console and issue
sudo apt-get -f install

Repeat it until you don't get any error messages.

Then, issue
sudo dpkg --configure -a

and repeat it, (or the previous command) until BOTH return immediately with nothing done.
Then reboot.

[kevindoyleie]

Re: graphical interface breaking

$ sudo apt-get -f install
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
0 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

sudo dpkg --configure -a
returns straight away with no messages.

[dibl]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Does

dmesg

show anything interesting? Whatever the error is during boot should show up there.

[GreyGeek]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Interestink!

In a konsole, as my custom is, I did an update on my guest Maverick.

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

It downloaded and installed 274 packages, a major upgrade.

I rebooted and everything came up nicely.

A few minutes after I got my desktop back again a Gear appeared in my system tray. I clicked on it and it was KpackageKit telling me that I had 254 updates. Curious, I decided to let it do its thing. when I switched back to the guestOS KPackageKit's file list panel was empty. I closed it and clicked on the "reboot" msg.

That got me into the dreaded login recursion cycle.

I did the usual "apt-get -f install" and "dpkg --configure -a" but they returned nothing.

I tried the "safe graphics mode". No change.

I deleted .xsession-errors and .Xauthority. No change.

I deleted the ~/.kde directory. No change.

So now I got serious. I executed the nuclear option:
sudo apt-get --purge remove kdm kubuntu-desktop
sudo reboot
and when I logged in to the console I reinstalled them:
sudo apt-get install kdm kubuntu-desktop.
No change.

Booted the previous kernel. No change.

Waiting for the next update, FIRMLY RESOLVED NEVER TO USE KPackageKit AGAIN!

Or, I might just download the daily LiveCD and reinstall my guestOS.

[dibl]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Here is where you went wrong:

Curious, I decided to let it do its thing.

I previously noticed on 10.04 that after I run

sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

in the Konsole, that KPackageKit then pops up the update notification -- it is "late to the party". But the update has already happened with apt-get -- no need to open KPackageKit.

It's the same with 10.10.

[GreyGeek]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Ya, I KNEW it was a big mistake but, hey!, this it was just a guestOS. On my main installation I would never let KPackageKit have its way with a major update. Just the onezys-twozeys ...

[GreyGeek]

Re: graphical interface breaking

I decided to download today's (09/15/10) Maverick's daily liveCD and install it as a guestOS.

It booted into the "Try" or "Install" option. I immediately jumped into the Install. During the prepare I encountered an "ubi-partman failed with an exit code of 141". (see attached graphic)

I tried the "Ignore" option and the install went through the motions, but never displayed the slider progress bar, and after 10 minutes I aborted the process and rebooted. When the "Try" or "Install" option came up again I took the "Try" option. The desktop came up nicely. I clicked on the desktop "Install" icon (I've had cases where the install worked from the desktop but not from the cd option menu) and got the same "Ubi-partman" failure, after which the desktop was restored.

So, I downloaded gparted and then tried it from the menu option. It asked for the root password, but leaving it blank didn't work. I opened a konsole and issued kdesudo gparted and it took off. I created a 15GB partion using EXT4 with the volume name of "/" and flagged it as "boot". I closed gparted and retried the desktop "install" icon. The install process called gparted sucessfully and I selected the entire "HD". The installation was fairly quick. I had opted for all the additional goodies to be downloaded and installed.

Then came the time to reboot. When the system came back up I got a login screen. I entered my name and password, the desktop deployment splash screen appeared, and around about when the 3rd icon was displayed things broke and the login screen re-appeared. It was the classic login loop.

That's where its sets. I'm going to bed.

EDIT - 09/16/2010:
This morning I fired up the Maverick guestOS to the console login. After logging in I ran
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade

About 20-30 files were upgraded or installed. I rebooted and let the graphic login take it. I was kicked back to the graphic login screen.

[wizard10000]

Re: graphical interface breaking

Ya, I KNEW it was a big mistake but, hey!, this it was just a guestOS. On my main installation I would never let KPackageKit have its way with a major update. Just the onezys-twozeys ...

Mentioned it in another thread but I learned the same lesson with muon yesterday, which made me sad. I'm sure it'll get fixed but as claydoh said in the other thread upgrades to development OS should probably be done with apt.

But as *I* said in the thread -

discoveries are made by not following instructions.

[brm]

Re: graphical interface breaking

There was another major upgrade this morning. It filled in the packages missing yesterday and installed without incident or intervention.

However, the problems remain with KDE failing to start and immediately kicking back to the kdm login screen.

I have reprted the problem on Launchpad as Bug #640497.

[GreyGeek]

Re: graphical interface breaking

I added to that Bug 640497 report.

[zenarcher]

Re: graphical interface breaking

I'm having the same issue here. I have also marked that the bug is affecting me, as well. Even doing a fresh install, then running updates will result in the same situation, looping back to the logon screen.

I finally got around it with a fresh install by doing the install, but not installing the proprietary Nvida driver right away. I did the install, then ran updates. Rebooting took me right back to the logon on screen loop. I then rebooted into Recovery mode, chose netroot, with an ethernet cable plugged in. I ran sudo apt-get install nvidia-current and installed the Nvidia driver. Following that, I rebooted but ended up with very low resolution. Opened a terminal and ran sudo nvidia-xconfig and rebooted again, finally ending up with my normal desktop back and everything working. It took a couple of fresh reinstalls before I got everything to work right, after installing the updates. It's a real major pain!

Cheers,
zenarcher