no graphical login screen

hi,

suddenly I am not getting to the graphical login screen anymore. After booting netrunner I end up with a black screen that says
Netrunner Dryland Second Edition computername tty1
computername login: _

I can login with my user account and do stuff on the command line.

I need to get this working because it is my office machine for work. It is netrunner 12.04 (Second Edition).
Any ideas?

Best,

Daniel

EDIT: startx doesn’t start x. Here some excerpts from the errors:

NVIDIA: API mismatch: the NVIDIA kernel module has version 304.88, but this NVIDIA driver component has version 304.108

Fatal server error:
no screens found

So this might be a problem with an NVIDIA update? Any ideas?

Yeah it seems like you have two different nvidia drivers installed. The kernel module which is at version 304.88 and the driver component which is at version 304.108.
I would recommend to remove all nvidia driver related stuff.

dpkg --get-selections | grep nvidia should give you a list of what nvidia packages are currently installed.

sudo apt-get remove <packagename> removes the package from your system.
After this it should run a update-initramfs -u and update the initrd. If it does not try running it manually with sudo and reboot.
Note: Make also sure that the /etc/X11/xorg.conf does not contain any nvidia driver references. (You can remove the whole file if you don’t need it)

I postponed working on this till after holiday season was over. I got a solution now, which I post here in case anybody else is affected. I found the solution in the following link and I restate here a summary of the steps.
http://ubuntuforums.org/showthread.php?t=2194584

I am not expert at all, but essentially, there is a mismatch in the version numbers of the Nvidia drivers in the kernel and the driver module (as the original error states). The proposed solution is to revert to an earlier version of the nvidia driver. Here are the command line steps.

jockey-text -l

In my case, this produced an error like “could not find any typelib appindicator 3”, which I resolved by

apt-get install  gir1.2-appindicator3-0.1

The output of “jockey-text -l” was

xorg: nvidia_304 - NVIDIA accelerated graphics driver (Proprietary, Disabled, Not in use)
xorg:nvidia_304_updates - NVIDIA accellerated graphics driver (post-release updates) (Proprietary, Enabled, In use)
xorg: nvidia_319_updates - NVIDIA accellerated graphics driver (post-release updates) (Proprietary, Disabled, Not in use)

To revert to the previous Nvidia

sudo jockey-text -e xorg:nvidia_304
startx

As a final remark, my feeling is that this happened, because I had to disable the repositories for Netrunner Dryland-SE (4.2), since they were down. Is that possible? See the related post here:
http://forums.netrunner-os.com/showthread.php?tid=1312