Blank screen and cursor - what to do? [Fixed]

So I finally get my AA1 up and running more or less like I want it to, and it craps out on me. Mind you, it's not the first time this happens. I had my first one for about an hour before the same thing happened.

Specifically, the desktop doesn't show. I get the normal bios stuff, the aspire one screen and then... blank screen with cursor on it. Caps lock gives me a response on the indicator as well. I'm guessing at this stage, a normal linux distro would have given me a CLI to fix whatever's wrong. But not here. Is this fixable, or do I have to restore it?

 

Re: Blank screen and cursor - what to do?

try sticking a thumbdrive in a usb port and see if a window pops open. you can get the console from there.

I hacked a config file and got the black screen of death; used this trick to reverse my "mods"....

otherwise there's a bios fix for this, search for it, I saw it earlier today

 

Re: Blank screen and cursor - what to do?

That's a no go. The bios fix - isn't that for machines that don't boot up at all, ie. the screen doesn't start up or whatever. To my non-technical mind, this looks like some kind of error in the xwindows configuration. Other than that - the problem has only showed up after messing about with my home network.

 

Re: Blank screen and cursor - what to do?

Update: after letting it be on for a while, I got the lower panel and the search bar. After a bit more, I get the entire desktop, minus a few icons and the network manager. I suspect that the Aspire one doesn't like autoconnecting to my home network, or something like that. Maybe not exactly that, but there's some kind of conflict here. Where do I go to delete my preconfigured networks? I have access to the complete UI after a while, so it might be a trivial fix

 

Re: Blank screen and cursor - what to do?

There's more to it than this I think - I deleted ~/.gconf/../networks and still the same stuff is going on

 

Re: Blank screen and cursor - what to do?

After messing about in /usr/sbin, I figured it out. I tried to run NetworkManager as user, and I got a message that I had to be root to run it. That was the ticket. The last time I had the system up and running normally, I had edited /etc/sudoers so that I wouldn't be able to sudo without typing a password. Apparently, that made the system unable to start the necessary processes at start up.