Xubuntu Black Screen

joe_dunne

Hi all,

I installed Xubuntu 9.10 on an older machine I have to try and give it a new lease of life.

The install went fine and I added the list of upgrades suggested and re-booted. When it re-booted my screen was black, I could no longer see my on screen icons either. I'm still able to see the tool bars and launch programs which run perfectly but when I exit them all I get is a black screen.

I should probably mention I had changed the appearance to one of the pre-config clear blue settings.

Any ideas on how to get the screen back?
As ever any help is gratefully appreciated.

Joe Dunne
Bujinkan Portlaoise

pickarooney

I'm not sure I understand - what exactly is black, just your desktop?

niallb

The most important thing to know is what kind of graphics card you have.
There's a lot of changes going on at the moment with both Intel and ATI cards,
and updates are seemingly randomly breaking support for some cards.
There are good fixes available, though it might be simpler to roll back to Ubuntu 9.04,
specifically to the Crunchbang version of it, which is much lighter on resources even than xubuntu.

How old is the machine ? How much memory, CPU ?

The particular problem you have sounds like one I had on an Intel chip with a laptop.
Things looked almost right, but the mouse wouldn't interact with the display.
Using the keyboard and shortcut/hotkeys worked OK!

You could try pressing ALT-F2, and typing in 'thunar',
but it's also worth checking your login screen, and checking what is selected for 'Session'

joe_dunne

Hi lads,

Thanks for the replies.

Its just the desktop that's black, the tool bars etc.
As for the graphics card its an ati I think.

It had been running ubuntu 9.10 perfectly well just a bot slowly, that's why I switched to Xubuntu on the understanding it was a bit lighter on resources.

I'm gonna upgrade the ram and pop Ubuntu proper back on it I think.

Thanks

Joe Dunne
Bujinkan Laois

loldog

That has just happened to me in Ubuntu 9.10 when I woke up from Suspend. The screen only shows the active part of the screen, like when I open a menu. I just used the desktop switcher (bottom right panel) and switched to another desktop, when I switched back, it was all OK again.

It's like Compiz (or Nautilus) forgot to draw the desktop, for whatever reason. Maybe this is what's happening.

.

pickarooney

Maybe try disabling compiz and using xcompmgr instead to see if that changes anything?
It's in Window Manager Tweaks in the xfce4 settings area.