Hi Bert,

I had a similar problem couple weeks ago. My error also said the same and
the problem ended up being lack of graphics card plug-ins. When i downloaded
nvidia-current and nvidia-glx from the synaptic package manager the problem
was fixed. By the way, I am running ubuntu on macbook. I don't know what
graphics card you have, but perhaps you should run it with gdb and backtrace
and see what it produces. Also try typing "modinfo [your graphics card
name]" and see what it says. I.e. mine said this before installing nvidia
plug-ins:
yglee@yglee-laptop:~/ros/ros$ modinfo nvidia
ERROR: modinfo: could not find module nvidia

Hope this helps,
Grace