Why do I have no prompt in terminal on XFCE in ubuntu 12.04

Solution 1:

The prompt was there the whole time!

The problem was a color setting found in Edit->Profile Preferences where it said "Colors" and defaulted to "Use colors from system theme". This was making it Black on Black!

I changed it to White on Black because that's what I'm used to, but there are many options in there, and you can select from various pallets.

This came after checking to see that /etc/shells had the correct/bin/bash in it and making sure my /etc/passwd file had /bin/bash at the end of the listing for my user. Those were given as possible solutions in other threads in other forums.