Jon N wrote: > I know I shouldn't mess with things, I really don't know what i'm > doing for the most part. But sometimes I can't resist. It is okay to mess with things as long as you learn about the system through the process. :-) > Now, when I boot my computer, after the Nvidia screen shows (I'm > running the drivers downloaded from Nvidia) (shakes head) > I get a screen with an unhappy looking computer graphic in the > center and below that the text: > "Oh no! Something has gone wrong. > A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please log out > and try again." I think that is GNOME or GDM failing. > There is a button labeled "Log Out" just below that. Logging out and > back in (nor rebooting) does not help. Your computer has booted the operating system just fine. Your system is running just fine. But the GNOME desktop environment has failed to start. Now some people might claim that GNOME *is* the operating system. But don't believe it. It is not. This is proven by the number of people that use Debian every day but do not have GNOME on the system at all. > The problem may have to do with gdm3. When I went to upgrade it > yesterday it wanted to install a lot of stuff I had previously > uninstalled as no longer needed, so I did not upgrade it. I installed > xdm instead, which worked. xdm is fine. It is the venerable original X Display Manager that gdm and kdm are based upon. If you preferred a pretty one then lightdm is the same but has shiny styling. I have been using it on systems with a graphical login manager installed. > But I don't know how to configure it and > it did not start the desktop I usually run (Mate) so decided to go > back to gdm3. I did upgrade it (along with installing the additional > packages it required) but now I get the message above. Look for errors in your $HOME/.xsession-errors file. > I booted to recovery a couple of times and tried various things. Why boot to recovery? If you are actually getting to the point where your installed gdm/gdm3 is giving you that error then your system is running perfectly fine. Simply log into it and fix the problems with GNOME. You do not need to boot a recovery. Your system will be starting six login terminals on the Linux console. Choose one of them and log in. One of these: Cntl-Alt-F1 Cntl-Alt-F2 Cntl-Alt-F3 Cntl-Alt-F4 Cntl-Alt-F5 Cntl-Alt-F6 Any of those will get you to one of the Linux VTs 1 through 6. The X session will be running on either VT 7 or VT 8. (It should be VT 7 and will be but due to a bug then the second time it will rotate up to VT 8 and remain there.) Use Cntl-Alt-F7 to return to the graphics session runing on VT 7. Or use Cntl-Alt-F8 if it is moved to VT 8. > Thinking gdm3 may not have been configured correctly I ran > 'dpkg-reconfigure gdm3' and get the message "[ ok ] Scheduling reload > of GNOME Display Manager configureation: gdm3". But it still does not > work. I also removed xdm thinking they may conflict, but that didn't > help. Multiple graphical login managers (X display managers) may be installed at the same time. The system selects which one to start by the contents of the /etc/X11/default-display-manager file. It contains one entry. It contains the path to the display manager to start. It will point to one of xdm, gdm, gdm3, kdm, lightdm, or other xdm alternative display manager. I sometimes edit that file manually and make the string point to a non-existent entry (append .disable) to temporarily disable things. Then it won't try to start an xdm at boot time and will display the Linux VT 1. > I tried dpkg configure -a in case something else was pending, dpkg --configure -a Good idea. But with the "--configure" not "configure". > but there was no output, and I still get the same message as above Then all of the packages successfully configured. > when I tried to boot to the desktop. And, finally, after some more > head scratching I ran 'apt-get install gnome', thinking that I was > missing something related to the Gnome environment. Although it > installed a lot of stuff (47 packages, I think), it still stops at the > same message as above. The "gnome" package is a meta package. It depends upon other components such as gnome-core. Removing gnome won't really remove core parts. If they weren't marked as manually installed then you might have them offered as a candidate with 'apt-get autoremove' after removing the 'gnome' package. But you could always remove them manually. You can get a list like this: dpkg -l | grep gnome > Other than reinstalling everything from scratch, can anyone offer any > suggestions on how to fix this? Figure out what you broke. Look in your $HOME/.xsession-errors file for clues. If you really have no investment in the system then installing a pristine image would reset things to a known state. But it is such a needless waste of time. If you want to avoid GNOME then I would install either 'xdm' or 'lightdm' and then install 'xfce4'. It is much more likely to operate correctly and successfully. Bob
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