Lisa breaks in wierd ways after upgrade

[Lelanthran Manickum]

My system upgraded overnight and was off this morning. I am running Mint 12 Lisa, Gnome 64-bit:
Linux 3.0.0-12-generic #20-Ubuntu SMP Fri Oct 7 14:56:25 UTC 2011 x86_64 x86_64 x86_64 GNU/Linux

This is a Dell gx620 with the radeon x600 graphics card (not using the proprietry drivers).
I am running wmaker and wdm instead of gnome or kde.

1. Screen remains blank after POST. Switching virtual terminals (ctrl-altf1-f7) works only briefly (about two seconds) before display goes blank again. Everything else seems to work fine (i.e. I can log in blind, etc). Grub also works fine.
FIX: Keeping my finger on the arrow key (any arrow key) after grub starts till the login window of wdm appears makes this problem go away. I do not know why.

2. Sound has gone away. Everything says that sound is there, and playing audacious2 gives me a spectrum analyser animation, but no sound is available through the speakers nor through the headphones jack. I've tried different speakers and different headphones to no avail. I've also tried killing and restarting pusleaudio, and installing (and using) alsa, with no success. Even alsa appears to think that the sound is coming out of the soundcard. As of writing, no fix has been found for the sound problem.

3. As I don't normally use gnome, I thought that this would be the perfect time to try it. CHoosing "gnome-session" from the wdm login screen results in a single button that says "gnome failed to start". I used synaptic to install gnome and all it's dependencies, with no luck.

Something really really odd is happening here.