Help with lost GUI in Ubuntu 11.10

[Peter Hillier-Brook]

On 29/01/12 23:35, Ioannis Vranos wrote:
> On Mon, Jan 30, 2012 at 12:40 AM, Peter Hillier-Brook
> <phb at hbsys.plus.com>  wrote:
>> On 29/01/12 16:39, Ioannis Vranos wrote:
>>>
>>> On Sun, Jan 29, 2012 at 6:04 PM, Peter
>>> Hillier-Brook<phb at hbsys.plus.com> wrote:
>>>>
>>>>
>>>> Thanks for replying. I see no graphical interface at all: the
>>>> last thing before a login prompt is a message that Plymouth has
>>>> been stopped (paraphrase) and the relevant logs - kern.log,
>>>> Xorg.log.0 and others I have forgotten - claim that there is no
>>>> support in the kernel for nvidia.
>>>>
>>>> Until I updated from 3.0.0-14 to 3.0.0-15 I had no problems. If
>>>> the log content is pertinent I will be happy to collect it, but
>>>> given that I'm in the "unhappy with Unity" gang, I'm not far
>>>> from a re-installation with Lubuntu with which I'm very happy
>>>> on other machines. :-)
>>>
>>>
>>> Try logging in the console, and type:
>>>
>>> sudo apt-get remove nvidia*
>>>
>>> sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-video-nouveau
>>>
>>> sudo shutdown -r now
>>>
>>>
>>> Then let us know if the problem was fixed.
>>
>>
>> Thanks for the suggestion. I'll give it a spin, but even if it
>> works it won't have identified why the update caused a failure and
>> will be an avoidance, rather than a diagnosis and fix.
>
> I provided those, because I am assuming some Nvidia packages either
> conflict, or were not installed properly.

Ioannis, thanks for all your helpful input. nouveau didn't help a lot, 
but you gave me a good pointer with the removal of nvidia*. By invoking 
apt-get install with nvidia* I achieved a working system again, despite 
the literally hundreds of error messages. Obviously nvidia* was 
overkill, but not knowing the precise packages required....

Regards

Peter HB