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Over the years I came accross situations where X Fails to start, and usually resolves it by installing the OS again. What would be the right way, Google results in tons of different ways non of which really ever worked. What then would be common steps to check why X has failed to start? I am looking for best practices to follow when troubleshooting something like this. Thanks!

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migrated from serverfault.com Oct 10 '11 at 20:21

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1 Answer 1

up vote 2 down vote accepted

Look in /var/log/Xorg.0.log and look for lines with (EE) in it. This will give you not only the error but also the cause. From there it is only a simple step to enter it into a search engine of your choice:

grep 'EE' /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Other sources that might help you on Ubuntu wiki:

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