[PLUG] Now I've done it

Rogan Creswick creswick at gmail.com
Mon Nov 23 02:08:30 UTC 2009


On Sun, Nov 22, 2009 at 5:24 PM, John Jason Jordan <johnxj at comcast.net> wrote:
>  If I startx as jjj I get
> a window without metacity or gnome panel, but the USB mouse and
> keyboard work. Great choices, eh?

This *really* sounds like something related to gnome-session is not working.

I'm assuming that (1) you were logging in via a graphical log-in
manager, rather than at a console and then running startx.

Since startx doesn't give you a window manager, but doesn't cause
(obvious) errors, you can probably start debugging things by just
creating an ~/.xinitrc file with different commands to run when X
starts (via startx).

First off, I'd put this in your ~/.xinitrc: (and nothing else -- if
you *have* a ~/.xinitrc already, please let us know what's in there.)

exec gnome-session

I suspect that that will get you back to about the same place root is
at now--in any case it will help figure out what's going on.

You can also specify different window managers / desktop managers in
the same way (replace 'gnome-session' with the respective command for
whatever WM you want to run, eg: start-kde)

You may want to install xfce4, just so you have another full-featured
WM to test with.  If you want to, specify:

exec xfce4-session

in your ~/.xinitrc after installing xcfe4 ('sudo apt-get install
xfce4' at a terminal should do it)

This *does not* sound like a problem with X -- X is running, so I
don't suggest tweaking your X config.

--Rogan

>
> Last time this happened right after installing Blueman. But this time I
> did not install Blueman, so it must be something else that has messed
> up the desktop. It could be any of hundreds of things. What am I
> supposed to do, reboot after every little change to make sure the
> change did not mess up the desktop? Is testing really this flakey?
>
> Last time I was able to right-click on the desktop and create a
> launcher to start a terminal. But this time right-clicking on the
> desktop does nothing.
>
> I am sending this from mydesktop computer. I thought I could get into
> my mail program by booting to a Karmic live CD on the laptop. The live
> CD mounted the testing drive all right. And it let me transfer the Mail
> folder to the live CD. But it won't let me transfer the ~/.sylpheed-2.0
> file that has my mail accounts in it, not even from the command line as
> root. Strange that the live CD lets me read the mail folder but not the
> configuration file. What kind of security is that? Of course, I could
> also replace the new hard drive with the old Jaunty drive and boot to
> Jaunty.
>
> So here I sit all bummed.
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