Black screen on startup without upstart (Ubuntu 15.10)

Currently when I try starting my computer in normal mode it will display the pulsating kubuntu logo and then a black screen will stay forever.

What I did to get here: Installed Ubuntu 15.10, installed kde desktop right after. I was playing around with compiling 64-bit and 32-bit stuff at the same time and in the process of installing 32-bit gcc or g++ or something like that it uninstalled some kde packages. It did warn me, yes. I take full responsibility for that. As I did not restart, the system ran fine for a few days until today it crashed and I restarted it. It did not boot to desktop, I got to enter my login and password to get a command line. It complained only about wine-staging:i386 being broken, kinda random, probably not relevant. So naturally I wanted to get rid of kde completely and get the defaults back so I installed ubuntu-dekstop. Restarted and that's it, black screen and nothing happens. But the strange thing is when I choose to boot with the upstart option it starts just fine. The question then is can I get normal boot to work again? And maybe get rid of the kubuntu logo on startup?

2 Answers

To solve the issue the correct version of libqt5x11extras5 needs to be installed.

sudo apt-get install libqt5x11extras5=5.4.2-2build1

5.4.2-2build1 is the correct version for Wily according to packages.ubuntu.com. Previously I had version 5.5.1-1 that caused segfaults.

The broken package is from Kubuntu-ppa Backports:

hhmm, i386 broken......well that doesn't sound good at all. For a stable Desktop OS I'd honestly wipe it and install the most current Ubuntu LTS OS. Which is currently 14.04 until 16.04 releases (traditionally in late April and then again in October). While 15.10 is not LTS it is only supported for 9 months, it is expected to be buggy.

BUT if you do actually want to attempt to fix it start with:

sudo apt-get update

first then

sudo apt-get upgrade

secondly, then reboot lastly. That obviously updates and upgrades your os. If that doesn't help then try a more brute force attempt:

sudo history

That should (key word: SHOULD) house every command you've done in terminal. Which may help you isolate exactly what commands you ran, to figure out what commands to revert. This helped me isolate and fix issues with desktop not showing on Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Precise Pangolin.

IF you ran the commands as root (not recommended!!) you'll have to be root to see roots history. For that:

su -

login with your root PW then run:

history

If those don't help; let me ask, are you running the 64bit version of Ubuntu on a 64bit CPU? or 32bit os on 32bit cpu? or 32bit os on 64bit cpu? or 64bit os on 32bit CPU?

Good luck with taming the wily werewolf.