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

[damian]

Rapael Morcha wrote:
> 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. :)
>   
Thanks for that Rapael, but I'm still getting the same thing.

I made the changes you suggested, but I'm still just getting a spinning 
cursor over a white background. It looks almost identical to how it 
looked before, but I'm sure the changes have taken effect because the 
loading splash screen seemed to change into the cream background in a 
slightly different way to usual (you know when something just feels 
different .. it kind of flashed in a way that I knew was different).

I don't know enough about X to say for sure, but I feel like it was 
loading ok both before and after changing to 'vesa'. The spinning cursor 
is part of the standard loading cursor set I usually have, the 
background is cream and the resolution seems right. It just doesn't get 
to the log in section.

Any other ideas?

Cheers
Damian