I’m working out of a book called Blender 2.5 Materials and Textures Cookbook. I was instructed to temporarily unlink a material, in order to give a clean surface to design the next material, by clicking F to fix it and then clicking X to unlink it. In the next recipe “Combining two materials, to make a third, using Nodes” I was instructed to use the same file as the one in which the material was fixed and then to select UseNodes to enable the Node editor. The problem is that when I do that, it doesn’t display a blank Material node linked to an Output node. The screen in the Node Editor remains blank and in the camera view, my object turns yellow against a black background and it says Node <none> in the materials field in the properties panel.
the first thing to come to my mind is: looks like youre on Ubuntu 10.10 and it needs some extra libraries to run correctly (see below) second of all, try under file¬user preferences¬load factory settings that did it for me (i am on 11.04), then if all this fails try and open a new or different file to see if it works.
I figured out my problem! I retraced my steps by doing the tutorial again and saw where I made my error. I think it has to do with rendering before saving my work. Everything seems to be working now, and all I did differently was I didn’t hit render before saving my work.