No GUI after upgrade to Ubuntu 9.10 (boots to command line)

Posted by Gathris on Super User See other posts from Super User or by Gathris
Published on 2009-10-31T21:05:36Z Indexed on 2010/03/15 11:50 UTC
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Filed under:

ubuntu-9.10

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graphics

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upgrade

I have just upgraded to Ubuntu 9.10 (network upgrade using the update manager, from 9.04 which had different graphics related problems) and when I try to boot into it all I get a small Ubuntu logo, flickering text and then the tty1 command line with a logon prompt.

startx gives following error:

Fatal server error: no screens found

I traced down a tutorial that said I needed the latest graphics drivers (Gigabyte ATI Radeon 4650 HD installed with 9.10 catalyst drivers) so I did using the 'sh' command and a USB stick (I have a working Windows partition) and it installed fine but did not fix the problem.

Edit: Thanks to UK and Arjan van Bentem below I was able to understand the full error message of start x:

Parse error on lone 2 of /etc/X11/xorg.conf
'nameserver' is not a valid keyword in this section
Fatal server error: no screens found

This has nothing to do with a graphical error (sorry if I misled anyone) but the xorg.conf file has 3 lines in it and lines 2-3 have an entry 'nameserver'. Using the nano command I commented out (using a # before the entries) the nameservers and can now boot Ubuntu.

Thanks to everyone for their help.

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