Can't login to Ubuntu

Hey guys, thanks for reading.

Upon booting my Linux kernel, I arrive at the background for my login screen, but the login box never appears. I can get to the recovery console version of my desktop through the command line, but I arrive to multiple messages of gnome panel failures. Any ideas are greatly appreciated.

 

Did this happen after a full system upgrade, or is it on a fresh install? What version of Ubuntu and for which architecture (32 or 64 bit?) Do you have a custom login screen theme? What graphics hardware do you have and what video driver are you using?

If you hit ctrl+alt+f1 or f2/f3 and log in to the console, can you run sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart (or gdm3 if that's your version) to get to a login screen?

 

This happened after I updated the glib and gettext libraries for compatibility with a python3 IDE. I'm running 64bit Lucid. No custom login theme. I'm running a 260m gtx on proprietary 173 drivers.

If a press ctrl-alt-f1, i just get a black screen, but from the recovery console I ran sudo /etc/init.d/gdm restart and it took me back to my purple background where my login screen should be.

 

In that case I think the answer is to reinstall the normal versions of those packages from the console and see if you can find updated versions that won't break your system.

 

Thanks. I'll give it a go.

 

I'm having trouble installing these packages from the command line. I'm getting error messages telling me that packages couldn't be found and archives are incomplete...

Can you help point me in the right direction? I installed glib and gettext after downloading tar.gz files and uncompressing them.

 

As long as you have a network connection, you should be able to do:

Code:

sudo apt-get --reinstall install libglib2.0-0 libglib2.0-bin libglib2.0-data gettext gettext-base

I'm assuming those are the packages you need. If not, you can use this to find the exact packages:

Code:

apt-cache search -n packagename

 

Tried the first command, but it couldn't find the libglib2.0-bin file. So, I searched for it using the second command, but it didn't return anything.

 

Alternatively you can download the packages you need from Ubuntu -- Ubuntu Packages Search and install them using sudo dpkg -i /media/nameofyourusbstick/whatever.deb

If you don't know which package you need, you can figure out which files were installed from the tar files you downloaded, and then run apt-file search /path/to/file

First you will need apt-file installed and updated:

Code:

sudo apt-get install apt-file
sudo apt-file update

 

I had to use my Linux partition for a homework assignment due last night, so I went with the last resort and reformatted. I feel like I cheated and took the easy way out.

Thanks for ALLurHelp! I really appreciate it.