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.