Black screen, white cross

Computer ran for weeks. A reset, and fluxbox is no longer starting.

The symptom is a black screen, with a white cross which can be controlled with the mouse. Clicking has no effect. CTRL-ALT-F3, for example, opens a terminal and login is fine. So, it appears X is running, but fluxbox isn't.


http://fluxbox-wiki.org/index.php?title=Howtos

was a good start.

Start fluxbox from the command line:

Add:

exec startfluxbox

to ~/.xinitrc



I did this, but cannot reset at the moment. Further reading suggested things might be different for ubuntu, anyway:

sudo vi /usr/share/xsessions/fluxbox.desktop

and add:

[Desktop Entry]
Encoding=UTF-8
Name=Fluxbox
Comment=Highly configureable low resource X11 Window Manager
Exec=/usr/bin/startfluxbox
Terminal=False
TryExec=/usr/bin/startfluxbox
Type=Application



CTRL-ALT-backspace will reset GDM. Do not perform CTRL-ALT-DEL as this will also reset the computer.