testing out next ubuntu distribution

[Tom H]

> I made a small partition (but large enough) to test out ubuntu 10.04
> (64-bit),
> installed it there, and it worked, some time. Then when there apparently was
> some errors in
> new updates, gnome stopped to start, and the start process dumps me in a
> shell. Today I did
> sudo apt-get upgrade
> which took some time and downloaded and installed a lot,
> but I am still dumped in a shell. ¿What to do to get gnome back?

I upgraded a Karmic install to Lucid two days ago and had the same
issue. You can launch gnome with startx.

The problem turned out to be that gdm had been uninstalled because of
a conflict with usplash (IIRC).

Run
aptitude full-upgrade
and gdm will be re-installed.