blank screen after boot-up after failed upgrade

[NoOp]

On 10/26/2009 11:19 AM, blittle2 at nyc.rr.com wrote:
...
> Later, I went into grub and chose one of the recovery modes and told
> Ubuntu to fix broken packages and it began to proceed with the broken
> packages and installation. This seemed to fix the startup issue which
> I think was just hangin at the error messages I posted earlier. Now
> I'm able to log in, however the system hangs on a blank desktop and
> never shows the gui. Just a mouse arrow.
> 

A couple of things to try:

1. Boot back into recovery mode & run dpkg again & see if it still comes
up clean. Sometimes it may take several iterations of the dpkg process
to clean everything up.
  Also note that dpkg will first do an 'apt-get update' and you will see
your repositories scroll by on the screen. See if they are all still
hardy, or if they are hardy/intrepid mixed.

2. Resume booting & when you get the blank desktop see if you can get
into a tty terminal mode: Ctrl-Alt-F1. That should give you a username &
password prompt. Login with your normal username & password and issue:

$ sudo dpkg --configure -a
$ sudo apt-get install -f
$ sudo apt-get update && sudo apt-get dist-upgrade

Check to see if it is still reporting as hardy:
$ lsb_release -a
If it is, it will appear as:

Distributor ID: Ubuntu
Description: Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS
Release: 8.04
Codename: hardy

It it is, then:
$ sudo do-release-upgrade

If 'lsb_release -a' reports the release as intrepid, then post your
sources.list file. Provide the output of:

$ cat /etc/apt/sources.list