Freeze at splash screen - how to fix??

[BDR]

Hi everyone,

I'm running Kubuntu FF and was working on installing several apps + tweaks yesterday. The most prominent of those was trying to get Compiz to work. I retired from the problem last night and went to bed. Everything else was working just fine, and in fact well after I'd quit working on Compiz, I even downloaded Gimp thru Adept, and called it a night. Everything was working cleanly, and I'd no thought of things going goofy in the morning.

Well, I awoke this morning to see everything going fine up to the login screen. I log in and it goes to the splash screen. It loads the first three or four (up to Windows Manager), then gets to "Desktop" for a flash of a second before the entire "splash" loading screen goes away and I only see the pretty blue background image and my cursor. That is, it gave up on something while loading the desktop.

I let it sit there for a while, but nothing happens. Ctrl-Alt-Backspace sends me back to login.

I'm very ignorant at coding, and how to use Konsole. That said: my best initial guess is to figure out how to get to the sources.list file and delete what I'd entered there for Compiz (I had inserted the text for FF that is given at http://gandalfn.wordpress.com/compiz-repository/ to my sources.list file). I can't imagine that being what's messing it up that bad. But I also cannot imagine what else would make it freeze at that point. Ideas??

Is there just a recovery mode that I can use to go back to a previous safe boot (a'la SystemRestore)?

Or are there some troubleshooting tips y'all may have for how to heal this problem?

Thanks much! Smiley

-Brandon

(this has been cross-posted from the Newbie forum)

[dibl]

Re: Freeze at splash screen - how to fix??

I will hazard a guess that your Compiz-related tweaking borked your /etc/X11/xorg.conf file.

To prove my theory, if you can log in to the text console and backup the present xorg.conf file with

sudo cp /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

Then you can run the xserver configuration script

sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg

and let it autodetect your graphics card on the first screen. Proceed through the script, and then it will dump you back to the command line. At that point, see if you can start your xserver with

startx

, and if so, you'll be able to log in normally, and have another chance to play with Compiz.

HTH