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 Bugs, which is subscribed to Ubuntu. -- ubuntu-bugs mailing list ubuntu-bugs@lists.ubuntu.com https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-bugs