Answer : it's you from the future. Here's how I fixed it: I didn't! I re-downloaded the 15.04 image from the Ubuntu website and created a startup "disk" on a USB thumb drive. Today it worked, wehereas it didn't last night :( Perhaps Canonical fixed their image... So I booted from the thumb drive and removed my existing 15.04 and installed a fresh copy! Sure I lost all of my files (VirtualBox, all installed games, etc.) but now Linux works again. Let this be a lesson to you Dustin! Never try and upgrade an Ubuntu OS! Just backup all of your files and do a clean install... just like you used to have to do with Windows! I had the exact same problem. I'm not sure exactly why it happened, but it seems my kernel was not updated. To solve that I used Ctrl + Alt + F1 to go to a text-based virtual console, logged on there, then ran: sudo apt-get install linux-generic Everything started working again. My fix for my laptop Dell xps l502x, so it