On Thu, 09 Jun 2005 17:10:05 +0200, Redefined Horizons wrote:
I then removed and reinstalled
> gnome, thinking that this was the problem. Niether of these actions
> solved the problem.
Did you "purge" the Gnome packages before reinstalling Gnome? Did you
reinstall gdm? (Out of curiousity, why did you think Gnome was related
to the problem, and not gdm, which gave the error message?)
> I'm really stuck here, and I'm not sure what to try next. What is
> causing this error?
Something that's tripping up gdm, possibly a bug. Since the session
manager is optional, as a test you can start X manually with xinit or
startx (see the respective man pages), or try another session manager like
xdm or kdm. (I tend to prefer kdm although I'm a gnome user.)
Is my swap partition not large enough? Is there a
> way to fix this problem, other than reinstalling Debian?
Always. Debian is not windoze. :-)
> P.S. - I know all eventually get this Linux thing figured out, with
> enough patience......
As a user, especially a new user, you shouldn't have to deal with these
problems. In my opinion Debian is really a "proto" distribution and
spinoffs like Knoppix or Ubuntu are for new users.
Secondly I never try to figure out problems unless I know it's a hardware
fault, which take up quite enough of my time, thank you. If it
doesn't "just work" as it should then 99% of the time, the answer is
archived somewhere on the internet, and if not then I just pass it on to
the Debian maintainers in the form of a bug report.