I recently had to recover from a hard drive failure in my Debian squeeze desktop computer. After the usual thrashing around I have managed to (I think) recover all my files and configuration information from backup, get grub installed, and get all the grub configurations set properly so that Debian boots and I am greeted with the Gnome login screen. Unfortunately, When I enter my username and password I am informed that my session lasted less than 10 seconds, and that if I did not log myself out then something must be wrong. When I view the ~/.xsession-errors file, what I see is:
/etc/gdm/Xsession: Beginning session setup ...
mkdtemp: private socket dir: Permission denied
When I try to use failsafe gnome, I get the error:
/usr/lib/libgconf2-4/gconf-sanity-check-2 exited with status 256
I can log in using failsafe terminal (so user account information has been recovered properly).
Any suggestions for what needs to be done? I have a Debian-live rescue CD and a Debian-live with Gnome DVD, both of which run correctly.
Thanks in advance,
-PT