This has been fixed now, reinstalling jaunty and installing the latest karmic updates worked fine. It seems like this was a duplicate of bug 421225 I got the same error messages when trying to run startx from the console.
** Changed in: xorg (Ubuntu) Status: Confirmed => Fix Released -- X/GDM doesn't start on Karmic Koala https://bugs.launchpad.net/bugs/434320 You received this bug notification because you are a member of Ubuntu-X, which is subscribed to xorg in ubuntu. _______________________________________________ Mailing list: https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat Post to : ubuntu-x-swat@lists.launchpad.net Unsubscribe : https://launchpad.net/~ubuntu-x-swat More help : https://help.launchpad.net/ListHelp