On Mon, Nov 23, 2009 at 10:31:14AM -0800, John Jason Jordan wrote: [...] > That day arrived a few days ago. I decided start over from scratch. I > used the netinst CD and reinstalled completely, reformatting the new > disk. Until yesterday afternoon I spent my time installing and > configuring as I did before. Everything was running great. I had just a > couple problems left to resolve. Then I decided to reboot. And then it > happened again - no metacity or gnome panel. Only this time I couldn't > right-click on the desktop and create a launcher either. I could boot > into Recovery Mode, but you can't start an X program from there. well clearly you should never reboot ;) so, what do you get? What does the screen look like? Is it the default X gray screen with a mouse cursor and nothing else? Is it some desktop backdrop that you set? we need some more information. Also, how are you selecting GNOME from the (I assume) GDM login? I'm wondering if you're somehow changing the default selection to be a .xsession session and consequently getting an empty session. > > So this long story boils down to two questions: > > 1) How can I fix Gnome? What part of the configuration starts metacity > and gnome-panel when the user logs in? Note that I'll have to do this > manually from XFCE, because I can't even get a terminal running in > Gnome. I'm not exactly sure that GNOME is broken. I think perhaps it's something simple (like the xsession thing above) and it's getting lost in the transmission > > 2) How the heck did this happen? I did hundreds of things before I > rebooted - which thing messed up Gnome? Can someone suggest a way to > find out what I did to cause this so I can file a bug report or at > least avoid doing it again? on the assumption that you've been doing lots of installing, take a lot at the aptitude logs and see if there is a clue there. Perhaps you've installed something that conflicts with GNOME (can't imagine what that might be) or removed something critical. A
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