Fresh install and update attempt - Kubuntu won't boot any more

[Kabuthunk]

I've just today installed kubuntu 10.10. I was not able to get a SINGLE reboot out of the system before it stopped working entirely.

It installed fine, it initially booted up fine. I installed the following programs:

Kolourpaint
Firefox
MS Core fonts
VLC Player

And then I ran a system update. 244 updates available if I'm not mistaken.


It downloaded all updates fine, and was installing them. It failed on installing one... can't recall the name offhand. I hit a key or something (was doing several things at once, accidentally hit spacebar or something while swiveling around to computer again), and the error went away.

Ok, fine I thought, I can re-attempt update later. In a bit, it told me that I need to reboot computer. Safe assumption after many an update.


After rebooting, I get the error:

Logging in Kabuthunk
Warning: Cannot open Consolekit session: Unable to open session: The permission of the setuid helper is not correct


Neither the keyboard or mouse work at this point. There's a 'close' or 'ok' button... something like that, however neither the keyboard nor the mouse does anything at this point.


I have not changed any permissions. The system was set to log me in automatically. Nothing remotely close to any of these settings were changed in the whole half-hour I had a working Linux install.

I didn't think to create an emergency boot disk as of yet, because as I said, I haven't even had it installed for a half hour, and haven't even gotten the chance to reboot it even once.



Is there any way of recovering from this? If I need to reinstall kubuntu I can do that... still have the install DVD, but if Ubuntu is so ridiculously unstable that it's going to have system-reinstalling errors in the first half-hour, there's something severely wrong. I have no clue what I did wrong, because I basically did just about NOTHING.


Note: I have Windows on another hard drive (was hoping for dual-boot, but not even that works yet... choosing windows from the grub bootloader just reboots the computer... have to get back into here by a BIOS boot order change... but I was planning to fight with that after at least updating kubuntu), which is how I'm posting.

[Rubberman]

Well, in this sort of situation, I usually reinstall the system from scratch...

[rokytnji]

I agree with rubberman since this is a fresh install. Whenever I get upgrade errors. I never reboot. I google the error first and see about fixing said error first before doing any reboots. Just food for thought.
[ubuntu] "The permission of the setuid helper is not correct" - Ubuntu Forums

[Kabuthunk]

Figured it'd come to that. I've reinstalled, and have the system working and whatnot. However, for obvious reasons I'm really hesitant to update the system. Not updating is generally not the best of ideas however.


Thus... keep in mind I'm fairly new to Linux... is there any way one can kinda... take an image of the system, so that if something goes horribly awry it can be set back to how it was an hour ago? I think the Windows version of this is a restore point if I'm not mistaken... something along those lines, never had to use it so I'm not sure. Don't suppose Ubuntu has similar restore points, does it?

[Rubberman]

Usually I manually update the system in this sort of situation so I am updating a few things at a time. One can eat a big meal in small portions a lot easier than trying to wolf it all down at once!