Status report, revised
Oh. Hooray. I've somehow cleverly convinced Kubuntu not to launch X on startup. That's swell. That's just fucking swell. Oh, I know X is there, with all my configurations and everything, because I can manually start it from the command line. But making it come up on it's own....
Argh.
All I want is happy Kubuntu.
Alright, I've fucking had enough. I'm going to play video games now.
Argh.
All I want is happy Kubuntu.
Alright, I've fucking had enough. I'm going to play video games now.
Comments
Did you modify /etc/inittab ?
Did you uninstall kdm?
Maybe try sudo apt-get install kubuntu-desktop and see if there are some missing things that it might fix.
Feel free to email me, I want people to love Linux. I'll help if I can. ;)
For the benefit of any other readers who might have suggestions: I tried Shawn's idea of running an apt-get for the desktop, but it doesn't seem to be missing anything. Kubuntu, weirdly enough, doesn't have an inittab file, but Shawn's suggestion pointed me to the event.d directory that replaces it. And KDM seems to still be there.
Shawn, I said it in the e-mail but I also want to say it publicly: thank you.
Also, one more thing, referencing Shawn's last line: even a problem like this makes you love Linux--after all, if something like this happened in Windows, what I'd have is a BSD with a hex code meaning nothing to anybody, and basically a brick unless I had a usable recovery partition. I have high hopes with this OS of being able to find the problem under the hood and fixing it, and even if I can't, Linux allowed me to do a robust enough install that I can probably re-install the OS without losing a byte of user data. That's just slick, folks.
I asked Twitter to come and see if anyone can help you better than I. I love the Linux community even more than Linux -- so hopefully between us all we can help.
But yeah, worst case scenario you could install Ubuntu. I mean, I hear that's what the Linux Journal video guy uses. hehehehe
I'm pretty sure that I ran "sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg" from the command line and followed the prompts to reconfigure the X11 settings to make it boot again.
Another option would be to boot the kubuntu liveCD or DVD and then copy the file /etc/X11/xorg.conf and then email it to yourself or something then copy it into your broken installation to see if that fixes things. Please back up your old /etc/X11/xorg.conf file before trying this fix, though.
You can type "runlevel" at the command line to determine what level the computer is currently running, just in case you aren't booting to a graphical runlevel.
If that doesn't work, try looking in /etc/event.d/ since I think they stopped using /etc/init.d config file in Edgy Eft (6.10) and started putting that runlevel info in /etc/event.d after they started using upstart for the boot process.
More info about upstart is available at http://upstart.ubuntu.com/
-K
Unfortunately, things aren't going well. I said in a note to Shawn I sent just now that I'm seriously considering using this as the last straw to switch to Ubuntu--I haven't been real happy with KDE4, and it looks like there may be some GNOME-native replacements for the software that's been keeping me hooked on KDE even with the interface changes--specifically Amarok and DigiKam, and I've been having some DigiKam issues on this install even before the load issues started.
I really have appreciated the suggestions, and have tried them to the best of my ability. (I'm not sure I'm ready to write an Upstart script, but I have a slightly better idea of how -buntu machines start now; thank you!) The internet is a wonderful place sometimes: I posted to vent, and it was cool to get suggestions and advice as a result of it.
I'm going to go through the suggestions y'all have offered and take one more look through what Google churns up. I'll keep everyone posted as to what happens, and thank you again, everybody, for taking the time to help me out.
It took me a while to wean myself off of K3B, but I'm now using GnomeBaker and Brasero. The change isn't as hard as I thought it would be.