[PLUG] Now I've done it

John Jason Jordan johnxj at comcast.net
Mon Nov 23 02:52:20 UTC 2009


Thanks for the suggestions. I'm still not functional, but I did things
and stuff happened.

First, still booted into the Karmic live CD I created an ~/.xinitrc
file (none existed before) and put "exec gnome-session" in it. Then I
rebooted to the regular boot option in Grub. Result: No change; that
is, mouse and keyboard worked, but no window manager and no gnome-panel.

Next I booted to Recovery Mode and logged in as root. I installed
xfce4, then edited jjj's .xinitrc file by changing the line to "exec
xfce4-session." Then I switched user to jjj and did cd to my home
folder. And then I did startx. Result: When X came up I had panels and
a desktop, but no mouse or keyboard. There was a popup message "failed
to initialize HAL."

For my third exercise I shut down (had to use the power button) then
restarted to the regular session. After logging in as jjj I got the
same blank Gnome desktop without a panel or window manager.

Not sure what this means.


On Sun, 22 Nov 2009 18:08:30 -0800
Rogan Creswick <creswick at gmail.com> dijo:

> 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.
> > _______________________________________________
> > PLUG mailing list
> > PLUG at lists.pdxlinux.org
> > http://lists.pdxlinux.org/mailman/listinfo/plug
> >
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