On Fri, 2005-08-07 at 10:56 -0400, Brandon Kuczenski wrote: > On Fri, 8 Jul 2005, Richard Boyce wrote: > > > Hi Brandon, > > > >> > >> I did it anyway, and it crashed my computer. So I rebooted into > >> recovery mode, switched back to the open 'nv' driver instead of the > >> closed 'nvidia' driver, and rebooted. Now I cannot start an X session. > >> I tried re-installing the nvidia driver and unfortunately, the situation > >> is the same. No X session with either driver. > > > > I think you may be misunderstanding where the fault is here - as the > > paragraphs below show, X starts fine. If you get a gdm login, or see the > > X cursor, X has started and is running. The problem occurs after that. > > > >> With no X session running, from a console, as myself, I type 'startx'. > >> The screen flashes, I get the 'X' mouse cursor in the middle of the > >> screen and the debian splash, but no little icons (gnome-panel, > >> nautilus, etc...). Shortly thereafter I get dumped back to the > >> console. No errors are reported. The output of the 'startx' command is > >> included here: > > > > (snip) > ,> > >> Before I got to the console 'startx' level, I was running from within > >> gdm, and the problem manifested itself in the same way. I would get the > >> standard greeter, select my username and enter my password, and the same > >> behavior would happen: Screen flashes, debian splash, but no icons, and > >> shortly thereafer, the X session would quit. But I would also get the > >> [not helpful, oxymoronic] log output in syslog: > > > >> From the two paragraphs above it seems very likely that the fault lies > > with the desktop environment you use. From your mention of nautilus I > > presume that this is gnome? Perhaps you could try choosing a different > > environment from gdm, just to confirm this. > > > > > Thanks for your response and your insight. I performed a few more tests > (sad that "starting my computer" is now tantamount to running tests) and > found: > - for my user, from gdm, the result is effectively the same for Gnome, > KDE, and Xfce -- I get a blank screen (or the debian splash) with a mouse > cursor which still responds to mouse movement, and then about 15 seconds > later I get kicked back to the gdm greeter. > - the computer has two other normal local users, who can both login from > gdm normally. > - root cannot login from gdm (default security settings) but can start > its own X session from console. > > So I agree with you that there is something wrong with my user, but it's > somehow lower-level than Gnome, but higher-level than X. What's there? > > I could, I suppose, try creating a new user, deleting the old user, and > then changing the UID of the new user (I need the UID to be the same in > order to interact with other computers properly). But if the problem is > deeper than user config files, this approach might not find it, especially > if the new user ends up with the same username and uid as the old user. > > If you have any suggestions, I'd be happy to take this discussion to a > more appropriate list, but I wouldn't know where just yet. > > Thanks again for your help. It would mean a lot for me to get this fixed. > > -Brandon > > Do you have a tail of .xsession-errors for your account? What does .gnome2/session say? I've had that sort of a problem - had to effectively recreate the user because I couldn't pinpoint the bad setting, but I've also had problems such as GTK 1 being incompatible with my graphics card driver (an old ATI Rage III Pro) from X11 4.3 - it sounds like one program, probably early in the session loading, is set in an incompatible way. Does even Failsafe Gnome fail? How about Failsafe Terminal?
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