Ubuntu doesn't automatically starts in graphical mode after upgrade to 11.10

Question

I updated from Ubuntu 11.04 to 11.10 today.

Instead of using update manager, I upgraded using sudo do-release-upgrade command in terminal. However, an blackout causes the computer to switch off and the installation is terminated halfway accidently.

After I switched on the computer, the Ubuntu 11.04 won't start it's GUI. So, I used Ctrl+Alt+F1, logged in and used sudo do-release upgrade again to resume the upgrade.

After the upgrade, the computer restarted, after choosing Ubuntu 11.10 from grub, the screen goes black, no bootloader or anything. Here is the screenshot of the screen after something appears..

After this appears, I used Ctrl+Alt+F1 again, logged in and used startx command. Ubuntu is back to normal. When I restarted again, it goes back to tty1. I have to use sudo reboot to get restart again, however, this time same thing happens and Ubuntu 11.10 won't start GUI automatically.

How do I fix this?

Solution

I had the same behaviour with my Lenovo Ideapad Y560p running 11.10. First install went fine but after restarting it didn't boot the GUI.

The issue was to do with the graphics driver. In the kern.log file I found the message "failed to load module "fglrx"". Which is the ATI Catalyst driver for linux.

So I did a "sudo apt-get install fglrx" . It installed the driver and now it boots up every time.

Comments

[Death]

I'm kind of fixed this; apparently some of the important package are not installed during the upgrade. I reinstalled ubuntu-desktop and lightdm, and no longer see the error. However, the bootloader still not showing up, and it takes extremely long to get to login screen. I think there are some packages that need to be installed, but I don't know how. I tried sudo apt-get update and it shows everything is up to date.

[Nathan Osman]

-1 It would be much easier to install the metapackage ubuntu-desktop.