I am toying with Karmic's alpha releases. So, in comes a new partial upgrade rolled out and I chose to get it. At the end of the upgrade, I had a rare - stuck linux - situation. So I hard rebooted; Only to find that the system now restarts to a GDM that is broken. It gets to a blank screen with a *loading* mouse icon. I was contemplating a complete redo(download the daily build for karmic and install it). However, I thought its worth troubleshooting. So on that blank GDM screen, I pressed Ctrl+Alt+F2 to open a tty. When I logged in, I got a lot of /dev/null: Permission denied Apparently, My upgrade dint finish well. First thing that came to my mind is to reconfigure the whole setup. sudo dpkg --configure -a But I was getting the same errors /dev/null: Permission denied . Pretty much everything I did got me to the same error. I rebooted to my Jaunty install. A quick search showed me how I could install this all important /dev/null . All you have to do was to remove and re