A funny thing happend to me tonight.

[Geoffrey S. Mendelson]

> Do you see a text screen with a *text* cursor or a *mouse* cursor?
> If it's the former, I can't see how this could be KDE or Gnome
> related...

No, I see a black screen with a working X windows mouse cursor.


> Try looking in /var/log for any X server messages, or try to run X
> yourself (startx) to see if you can see any hints of what's wrong.
> 

In xsession-errors I found the problem. Sometime in 12.04's maintenance 
a bug was introduced to Gnome on Intel GMA-950 video cards.

It was not in the 12.10 release, but was propagated between Wednesday 
when I installed it, and Saturday night when I upgraded it.

It runs of of space somewhere, the diagnostic message makes it look like 
disk space but it is in the video card itself. Although the bugs filed 
are for Gnome, using KDM and KDE did not fix it.

Since I had made a backup before I ran the update, I restored my system 
and it works fine. I won't be upgrading again for a while.

Meanwhile, any suggestions for a more stable distro.

This, Dotan, is the reason why I said NO ONE can warranty that Linux, 
especially UBUNTU will run on a computer.

While I don't think anyone sells GMA 950's any more, I would not be 
surprised if this bug also affects other Intel display chip drivers. If 
it is the case and you had bought 4 computers last week after testing 
them with the UBUNTU (or any variant of it) live CD, and installed it on 
them today, you would have 4 useless computers and or a big headache. :-(

Geoff.


-- 
Geoffrey S. Mendelson,  N3OWJ/4X1GM/KBUH7245/KBUW5379
"Owning a smartphone: Technology's equivalent to learning to play
chopsticks on the piano as a child and thinking you're a musician."
(sent to me by a friend)