rod mclaughlin

What to do if your Ubuntu desktop goes all black (21 feb 13)

I don't know how it happened, but Ubuntu (12) went back to normal Unix mode when I shut it down. When I restarted, it was a console. No worries:

$ startx

But that just gave me a mouse pointer on a black background.

How I wish I'd just left Windows on the machine!

I'm joking, of course.

Somewhere I read that it should be 'gdm', not 'startx'. That didn't work either. Then, somewhere else, it said

click on the desktop
ctrl-alt-T
that gives you a terminal
enter 
unity --reset
into the terminal

Portland

London