Till yesterday, my Ubuntu 9.10 was working fine. I had watched a movie using vlc. I had also charged my ipod using the laptop.

Today, when I started it, I automatically booted into command line. There seems to be no filesystem corruption etc as I can view/open (text) files. Before the CLI appeared, the screen blinked with a cursor, then the white Ubuntu logo flashed, and then I got the CLI login prompt.

After logging in, if I try startx, to start gnome, I get the following error after a few seconds:

• giving up
• xinit: No such file or directory (errno 2): unable to connect to X server
• xinit: No such process (errno 3): Server error*

The same error comes up, even if I use sudo, or if I change my directory to '/' before using startx, and also when, from the grub, using the recovery mode option to load into CLI, and then trying startx.

On trying command 'xinit', I get "Server error"

Also, on trying GDM, I get 2 errors.

I cannot connect to the internet in this state.

Thanks for any help.

I am using Dell Inspiron 1440, no special graphics card.