Spinning Cursor on boot up. Log in screen doesn't display

[Rapael Morcha]

On Wed, Oct 31, 2007 at 07:43:15AM +0000, damian wrote:
> Hello all,
>
> The upgrade to 7.10 on my girlfriends laptop (Compaq X1000) seemed to go 
> fine, but suddenly I can't log in with the GUI any more. The machine boots 
> up and gets to the point where the log in screen is about to pop up, but it 
> never gets there. The spinning cursor just keeps spinning on a plain cream 
> background. I can Control+Alt+F2 to log in, but restarting gdm  and trying 
> to startx doesn't sold anything.
>
> I'm a bit of a newbie to the Linux command line so if there's much of that 
> then please take baby steps with me.
>
> I searched the forums and found something about dpkg-reconfigure-xxxx 
> (can't remember the exact line). I tried that, but still have the same 
> problem (and there were so many questions that I responded to without 
> knowing the answers that I don't even know if I've made thins worse).

try 'dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg', select 'vesa' as video driver and you'll be good to go. This you can say is your fallback mode. But afterwards, you can get ati/nv driver to select and get it to work. 

Doesn't 7.10 feature, X rescue mode? It had been boasting about that for a while now. Why doesn't it work in your case? I think better file a bug for that. :)

-- 
Cheers,
Raphael.