I was a little worried that the hard drive in my laptop was dying (though, looking at the Load_Cycle_Count, I don’t think it is Ubuntu’s fault, at least not because of cycle time) and since I was on-site, I was able to get a loaner laptop. I decided to use XFS (/boot would be ext3). Big Mistake. Everything worked great on the installation, but as soon as I installed all the updates and rebooted, gnome-terminal wouldn’t start. Took a little doing, but I discovered that my XFS partition had become corrupted. Ran xfs_repair and it dumped a few files in /lost+found. But now things work. Take heed.