Black screen upon starting up Kubuntu

[Reinhold Rumberger]

On Friday 12 March 2010, Keith Clark wrote:
> On Fri, 2010-03-12 at 01:19 +0100, Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> > On Friday 12 March 2010, Keith Clark wrote:
> > > On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 23:44 +0100, Reinhold Rumberger wrote:
> > > > On Thursday 11 March 2010, Keith Clark wrote:
> > > > > On Thu, 2010-03-11 at 10:50 +0800, Goh Lip wrote:
> > > > > > Boot into recovery, select boot normal, at prompt, login
> > > > > > and type either 'sudo kdm start' or 'startx' 
> > > > > > (preferably the former)
> > > > > 
> > > > > 'sudo kdm start' results in 'sudo: kdm: command not found'
> > > > 
> > > > That should have been "sudo start kdm"...
> > > 
> > > This results in 'start:  Unknown job:  kdm'
> > 
> > That kinda implies that you don't have kdm installed...
> > Do you?
> 
> That should have been installed with the rest of the KDE package,
> no?

Yeah, well, what do you expect from an alpha... :-)
Have you made sure that the kubuntu-desktop package is installed? It 
sometimes is in the way of an upgrade and get uninstalled 
automatically.

> I installed it and still a black screen as before.

Can you verify that the X server is running? Have you looked in 
/var/log/Xorg.0.log and /var/log/Xorg.0.log.old to see whether there 
are any errors/crashes?

What used to help me when kdm wouldn't start properly was to manually 
issue "sudo stop kdm", making sure that no more X servers were active 
and then issuing "sudo start kdm". When the X server wouldn't start, 
there would usually be a log entry stating that a lock file was 
found.

HTH

  --Reinhold