Vijaya S wrote:
I'm confused by this. 'startx' is the manual way of starting X. 'gdm' is an automatic way of starting X (well, the X logon process). Generally 'startx' and 'gdm' will conflict with each other.Hi all, There was power off and machine shutdown, After rebooting the Xserver wouldnt start on a Debian mahcine. So i did startx and then gdm
X is starting, but it's not finding any clients to run. I'm suspecting that you're running Sid or Testing, and at some point you did a system upgrade which removed your default window manager/environment without you noticing, and the next time you rebooted (restarted X), this problem manifested itself.Now i get the login screen but after i login nothing happens i dont get the desktop. its just blank
Alternatively, perhaps you're running KDE or Gnome and your user's pref files for that environment are broken.
It depends a lot on what you mean by "its just blank". Try right-clicking on the desktop; do you get a menu?What window manager / environment were you running/expecting? KDE? Gnome? wmaker? icewm? etc etc
If you can't get out of X, press Ctrl-Alt-Backspace. Then at a text mode prompt, type something like "which icewm" or "which wmaker" or "which twm". Hopefully one of these will give a return like:
/usr/bin/icewmThen create/edit ~/.xinitrc and put the single line in it that has the name of that window manager (icewm, etc), and then try starting X again. If you get that wm, then you're getting closer.
-- Kent