Re: I screwed up gdm3, can't recover
On Sun, 08 Feb 2015, Thomas H. George wrote:
> On Sun, Feb 08, 2015 at 09:44:21AM -0800, Patrick Bartek wrote:
> > On Sat, 07 Feb 2015, Thomas H. George wrote:
> >
> > > OK, my fault.
> > >
> > > A new jessie installation. Display problem so I tried to switch to
> > > xdm. When this didn't work I tried to switch back to gdm3. No Go:
> >
> > What display problems? You don't say exactly. Also. What's the
> > specs on your system? How old is it? Etc.
> >
> System is an HP Compaq dx2250 microtower about 8 years old I think. It
> was my daughter's microsoft home office computer which she replaced
> last year. I took out her sata drives, installed one of my own and
> installed jessie. Boot up and all the settings and programs I tried
> worked perfectly including gdm3 and the gnome desktop.
>
> I created the display problem. The HP box has only vga, no hdmi so I
> experimented with the settings and chose an incompatable one resulting
Ah! The ol' problem between the keyboard and chair problem. The
hardest kind to fix. ;-)
> in a black screen. I created a second user, tom2, and the display
> opened normally for tom2. To recover my initial work I ran rsync -r
> --stats /home/tom/ /home/tom2. All my data was recovered but on
> reboot the display wouldn't open for either tom or tom2.
Try this: Reboot. When you get the black screen, hit CTL-ALT-BKSPC
simultaneously. This should shutdown the X-Server and drop you to
a terminal. If it doesn't, post back here with the details. This
should be a root terminal. Read the output on the screen as to what
went wrong.
If you have access to the system from this terminal, see if there is an
xorg.conf somewhere. Normally, it would be in /etc/X11/ There
probably isn't one -- too old school. All that X info is now created
at boot time every boot. If not, create one. 'man xorg.conf' for
details. Create or select the default screen resolution you want in that
file. Remember since your system video only supports VGA, only use VGA
resolutions and timings. No New Age hdmi wide screen shit. You'll break
the system as you've found out.
If you want "modern" screen resoutions, etc., install a modern video
card. And a monitor that handles it.
The "other" way is to find the user's (Tom) local X config file and
delete it, so when the system reboots, it will read the hardware and
select the best resolution for the video card-monitor combo. I'm not
familiar at all anymore with how GNOME is set up having left it years
ago, and only use a window manager now. So, I have no idea where this
file might be: /home/Tom/.config/gnome, maybe?
> Not wishing to create tom3 I tried installing xdm. There was some
> problem with that so restarted gdm3 with the following result.
>
> > > gdm3.serviceJob for gdm.service failed.
> > >
> > > Looked for solution in man systemctl, found reset-failed command.
> > > Tried
> > >
> > > systemctl reset-failed gdm.service
> > >
> > > exit code was 0 but problem was not fixed.
> > >
> > > tried apt-get install --reinstall gdm3
> > >
> > > problem not fixed.
> > >
> > > What to do? Reinstall jessie? Continue experimenting with
> > > systemctl commands?
> > >
> > > Any suggestions?
> >
> > Yes. Reinstall, expert mode. So, you can see what the installer is
> > choosing to install.
> >
> > Try just a terminal only install and see if that works. X could be
> > the problem.
> >
> Reinstall would certainly cure all my mistakes. Before doing that I
> found xdm works but only allows me to log in as root and then brings
> up the gnome desktop with all the installed programs. I can live with
> this until I find out how to correct systemctl's problem with gdm3.
Ah! The classic Can't-leave-it-alone-until-I-fix-it masochist. They
have a support group for that. We meet every Tuesday at 7. Use my
name to get the fresh donuts. ;-)
B
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