I had a system running 10.04, I think. I upgraded it to 11.04, everything was fine. But then when I upgraded it further to 11.10, the system would only boot to a terminal, no desktop like before.

I installed 12.04 on it instead, keeping /home which was on another partition... but it's still booting to terminal. I believe there may be some bad configuration files left over that are causing this.

Looking at other similar issues, I looked for /etc/X11/xorg.conf but it doesn't exist. startx says it isn't installed. Installing nvidia-current didn't help (has GF 6600 GT video card). Alt+F7 shows a blank screen.

I used the alternate installer, and didn't select any of the optional packages it prompts during installation. Should I have?

How do I get it to boot to desktop like normal?