[PLUG] Now I've done it

[John Jason Jordan]

OK, it happened twice after installing Debian testing, and now it has
happened with my brand new installation of Fedora 12. I have been
rebooting Fedora every few hours, and I just did so. Yep, the window
manager and gnome-panel are gone. And this time the desktop is gone as
well - no icons at all, just a totally blank screen with my wallpaper.

I cannot get a terminal in X. I do have the mouse and keyboard, but
without a panel or a desktop there is no way to launch an x-terminal.

I can go to a command line with Ctrl-Alt-F2. (For some reason Fedora
uses Ctrl-Alt-F2 to go to a command line and Ctrl-Alt-F1 to return to
X). But you can't launch an X program from that command line.

Last time this happened (second try at testing) Rogan suggested
installing Xfce4. I did so, and when the login window came up I was
able to select Xfce4 instead of Gnome. That got me a usable desktop. I
still ended up being unable to fix the problem in Gnome, and after
several days I gave up and tried Unstable, and now Fedora 12. 

However, this time (as root) the command "yum install xfce4" returns
"no package xfce4 available." I also tried "yum install kde" but got a
similar error message. If I do "yum search xfce4" I get a long list of
packages relating to xfce, but none that appear to install the desktop.
Ditto for kde. It escapes me why there would be tons of libraries,
utilities and configs for these desktops, but no package to install the
desktop.

>From past experience, once this happens, it is unrepairable. OK, it is
probably repairable, but 1) I have received multiple suggestions from
people here and on the Debian e-list, and nothing solved the problem.
Creating a new user worked for a while, then suddenly the new user lost
the window manager and panel. And 2) if I ever get to the bottom of it
I bet it will be a bug in Gnome 2.28.0. In other words, it probably
isn't repairable until there is a fix.

I know that Fedora 12 uses Gnome 2.28.0. I could swear that Debian
testing did as well, but I have to check on that to be sure. If I am
right, then there is no point in installing a distro that uses 2.28.0.
I have no idea what I am doing that causes this, but I do know that I
need all the applications that I have installed. 

I'm also running out of patience. :(