Today when booting my computer (10.04 32-bit, System76 lemur) Ubuntu ran the hard drive scan -- as it was finishing the screen went black with this message:
(process:301): GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r (): failed due to unknown user id (0)
No key functions seemed to work. I restarted the computer with the power switch and it has since been functioning fine... what happened? Is there something wrong?
It has nothing to do with fixing filesystem errors, though it is a rather generic error and hard to diagnose. It could be something serious, but most of the time it's not if GDM is coming up just fine.
There is a bug about it here: https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+bug/531027 which shows just how generic it can be, feel free to add yourself to the "I am affected by this" list.