Hello! Last week I installed Debian Wheezy on my Desktop computer with Gnome 3, it's been working wonderfully. On Wednesday night I was using the computer fine, as usual, performed no updates or anything, and when I was finished I shut down as usual. I didn't use the computer at all on Thursday but upon booting up my computer today (Friday) I was faced with an issue. Debian boots straight into TTY1 and I am never met with the friendly login screen as I was previously.

So the first thing I did was ALT + F7 to try to get into a graphical session if it existed, that didn't work. Second thing I did was log into the TTY and then run `startx`. So the screen flashes as everything starts up then I am met with a screen that says: "Oh no! Something has gone wrong.", an image of a desktop computer with a frowny face and "A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please log out and try again." [logout button].

So I press the logout button and I have returned to my TTY session. What does this mean? What happened to cause this to happen seemingly randomly? Any help is very much appreciated because I don't want to have to reinstall...

What is the output of:

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That's about what I got. I typed it by hand so hopefully there aren't any typos, but that's what I got.

Thanks for the help.

The logs are clear then.

I had that error message myself recently when trying to start GNOME-classic without Nautilus (Caja) installed.

Had you removed or installed any programs before your system started misbehaving?

Have you added any PPAs or Testing/Unstable sources?

I did add a Debian Jessie non-free source and installed Steam. Do you think this caused the issue?

Thanks for the help.

Yes, yes and thrice yes.

Please read this link:
https://wiki.debian.org/DontBreakDebian

EDIT: You will have to re-install from scratch, sorry.

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Ahhhhhhhhhhhhhh....

Alright, thanks for the help then.

You're welcome.

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Why is a re-install required? I have Steam running on Debian Jessie on another computer working fine. But I tried installing Steam on a new laptop and I get the "Oh no!" message as well. Both are running Testing.

I'm running Debian Wheezy and I stupidly added a Jessie source in order to be able to obtain Steam. Apparently it's a really bad idea to mix version sources in Debian, now I know, lol.

Keeping in mind that I am an expert at breaking systems by similar means and ones quite a bit more advanced;

You may get away with adding a package like whatever it takes to install steam if you immediately remove the entry from your sources.list that suplied it.

There are several things that can go wrong when mixing Stable and unstable repos. The main cause is the that Wheezy is basically 3 years old. Jessie is not. Jessie has packages that are not going to work with wheezy packages just do to the difference in package version.

Assuming, however, that steam doesn't upgrade some of your depends so that they no longer work with the packages they were installed to support from the Wheezy repos then installing that and getting rid of the Jessie repo will leave you pretty safe.

If you leave the jessie repo in the sources.list then you are going to be upgrading wheezy partially to jessie and having a totally confused system.

A clean install is not really needed. You can fix this from where you are now. I can attest to that by personal experience and it is a very educational adventure. It will also take you a LOT longer than a clean install. Hours at best.

If you want newer packages install testing or Sid. This testing round I find that Sid actually runs a bit better on my hardware than Jessie does. This was not the case with Wheezy when it was testing.

There really is little harm, except maybe getting a buggy package, in installing Sid packages in testing. They are not that far apart. If you are patient for a little while the Sid packages will show up in testing anyway.

My Wheezy install, for instance, is actually running Thunar 1.6.? which was lifted from the experimental repo when Wheezy was testing. Xfce 4.10 was supposed to be used in Wheezy but was dropped out of the repo and reverted to 4.8 because of problems with the panel way to close to freeze time for Wheezy. That ment that Thunar was reverted too and what ever version 4.8 ran didn't have tabbed file browsing. I like tabs, I put in the newer Thunar which had, along with all of Xfce 4.10 been thrown back to experimental.

This has caused me no problems at all. The package fit fine with Wheezy at the time and it is still the same version so it is still fine.

You couldn't possibly get me to install packages for testing or Sid in that Wheezy install today. Could be altogether too much fun.

I would suggest a dual boot with testing or Sid with any new package you want to have. You wouldn't need a large / partition. And, assuming you have a separate /home for Wheezy, you can share the /home. Only thing you MUST do is use a different user name for each install sharing a /home. This avoids conflicts in your user configuration files (~/.foo). Linux is a multi user system and this really isn't any different than have more users on one install.

Testing and Sid take more management than stable does by far. Ignoring running update/upgrade cycles pretty often, I do it everyday, can cause some grief and, at least, make for really large numbers of packages to be upgraded at one time.

On the other hand if you want the newer packages this is the way to do it.

Keep in mind that Debian uses a different definition of Stable than most distros. Ubuntu bases their LTS versions on Debian testing. Their "regular" versions, all those between the LTS releases, are based on Sid. With a little care it is not hard to keep them ticking along quite nicely.

I was a bit upset with this Sid install the other day. Had to reboot to clear out some problems. Checked my uptime and it was only 9 and a half days. There is a reason it is called unstable. Under Wheezy that would really tick me off.

Oh okay, I mistakenly thought you were running Jessie. I had the exact same error message as you while running Jessie as well, which I think was due to installing the glx-i386 drivers when I don't have an nvidia card.

@widget -- You would be better off running a pure sid system rather than Testing with some packages from Unstable.

The situation in Debianland has changed somewhat since they introduced the Experimental repository.

While it may have been the case in the past that Testing was more reliable than Unstable, this is no longer true.

The packages in Unstable migrate to Testing after a period of 10-14 days. This delay means that if any packages in Testing have problems, they remain broken for a while.

In sid, newer packages are pushed out very quickly and any borkage is much shorter-lived than that found in Testing.

Have a read of what the Debian developers themselves recommend:
https://www.debian.org/doc/manuals/d...aq/ch-choosing
As you can see, Testing is not recommended for anyone -- these days it is the pure development version.

IMO there is no point whatsoever running a Testing system with packages from sid -- just run pure sid.
The main problem with trying to run Steam in wheezy is that it requires version 2.17 of glibc -- this library is used by almost every program on the system and upgrading it will break wheezy.

What I am on right now is Sid. Sid is my production OS.

There are installs on here of Debian 6, 7, testing and Sid.

There are times in testing when you really are better off to grab a package from Sid. This is due to bugs, when found in testing and then patched, do not go to the testing repo. They go to the Sid repo first to make try to make sure that they are not introducing a new bug. Therefore the bug fixes, if the bug in fact is affecting your testing install, from the Sid repo make life a lot more pleasant.

Currently the only out of version package I have installed is LibreOffice 4.4 in one of my "victim" installs of Sid (not this install). That package is available in the experimental repo. It will not be available to Sid until after Debian 8 (Jessie) is released. This is also going to be installed on my victim testing install.

Those victim installs are used as buffers for package upgrades that for some reason worry me as to their affect on the testing or Sid installs that I actually use. And to try packages that may be interesting from other repos. They are basically ment to be expendable.

Yes I am a serial multi booter. So far I have not found a 12 step program for this afliction.

I do not recommend to people to mix repos. It can be done. With care and a knowlege of what will be added or, apparently in the case of steam on Wheezy, what will be removed.

People should first off have working knowledge of what their system needs and look carefully at what is being done before hitting Y on the install. It would be a great thing to know something about pinning too.

Pinning is something you learn after breaking systems enough times to decide maybe the tools available are there for a reason.

But really if you want the newer packages, instead of mashing them into a version not ment to run them, installing an unstable version is the best way to go.

Hopefully tonight I am going to reboot and switch over to testing for a couple of days. Had some sort of network problem with my main testing install in chroot last night. Need to straighten that out. It is the kind of thing that is supposed to happen, if happen it must, to the VictimT install. A bit peeved with myself about this one.