Re: Unable to boot into the Gnome desktop after installing Debian Buster 10.4
On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 07:36:06PM +0000, gajuph4pre@yahoo.com wrote:
> I did not install any desktop environment, print server or the standard system utilities offered during installation.
> After successfully installing the OS, I rebooted into tty2 and installed the packages named below:
>
> xorg gnome-core gnome-tweak-tool synaptic gedit gdebi file-roller
> Next I rebooted the OS and there was a list of messages flashing quickly on my screen. All of them were prefixed with [OK] with the word OK in bright green. I assumed there were no errors.
> However instead of booting into the Gnome desktop, all I got is a white cursor blinking in the top left hand corner of my screen whose background is black.
At this point, you don't know whether the problem is down at the X/video
driver/hardware level, or in GNOME.
First things, first: you can boot back into console mode by going into
the GRUB menu, editing the boot command and adding
systemd.unit=multi-user.target
as a boot parameter. See
<https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/19/html/Installation_Guide/s1-grub-targets.html>
for exact instructions.
Once you're in console mode, you can try to diagnose the hardware and
drivers and firmware, and then test X without involving GNOME or gdm3.
Check your video hardware by running "lspci -nn" and looking for
one or more lines that tell what your video card is. Take note of
the 8-digit hexadecimal PCI ID(s) from your video devices. Write
them down on paper. Use them if you need to investigate deeply.
Look for missing firmware next. "dmesg | grep -i firmware" will tell
you if there are any firmware files that your system wants to load,
and can't. If there are missing files, write down their names, and
then use a web search (either packages.debian.org or google) to find
out the name of the firmware packages that contain those files.
You may need to add contrib and non-free to your sources.list to get
the firmware for your devices.
Once firmware is installed, reboot again (still using multi-user.target),
make sure xterm is installed, and then try "startx xterm". If this gives
you a bare but working X session with only an xterm in the upper left
corner, then congratulations -- you know X works.
(Bare X uses focus-follows-mouse semantics. You'll need to move the mouse
pointer *into* the xterm to be able to type in it. Type 'exit' to get
out of it.)
At that point, you can try "startx" by itself, which should try to
run your GNOME session (unless you've installed something else as the
system default x-session-manager). Or you can start gdm3, if you
installed that. Or you can reboot without the multi-user.target option.
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