I rebooted recently, and now terminal fails to work. If I click the terminal shortcut or use Guake or ctrl-alt-T, the terminal opens briefly with no prompt, then immediately closes again. I installed xterm as well and the same thing happens.

If I use ctrl-alt-F1 to get to a command line session and type gnome-terminal I get the error message:

Failed to parse arguments: Cannot open display

How can I diagnose and fix this?

EDIT TO ADD .bashrc

PATH=$PATH:$HOME/.rvm/bin # Add RVM to PATH for scripting



[[ -s "$HOME/.profile" ]] && source "$HOME/.profile"



[[ -s "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm" ]] && source "$HOME/.rvm/scripts/rvm"



### Added by the Heroku Toolbelt

export PATH="/usr/local/heroku/bin:$PATH"

alias zf=/home/julio/ZendFramework-1.12.3/bin/zf.sh

EDIT 2-- adding .profile:

# if running bash

if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then

    # include .bashrc if it exists

    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then

    . "$HOME/.bashrc"

    fi

fi



# set PATH so it includes user's private bin if it exists

if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then

    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"

fi



export SCALA_HOME=/usr/share/scala

export PATH=$PATH:$SCALA_HOME/bin

source ~/.profile