zenity is a nice utility as part of the gnome window manager that allows you to script from bash and retrieve the input from the user. It could also be helpful in just notifying a user when they login with a popup window.
I'll give an overview of what's available with zenity:
Application Options:
--calendar Display calendar dialog
--entry Display tex........
This is not the normal "black screen"issue and I was shocked to eventually find out why. The normal advice of reconfiguring Xorg didn't work. Even booting into "Recovery Mode" did not help.
Here is the short end of the stick that fixed it:
sudo apt-get install mdm mate-desktop-environment
Yes you got it right, mdm and the mate-desktop-environment / gnome were somehow uninstalled. This must be whe........