I installed FC20 64bit with Mate DE on a spare drive. Having spent several years away from Fedora, using Ubuntu, and for the past 2 years Linux Mint, it took a bit to get back into the swing of things using yum and yumex. But I was getting things installed and dressed up to my liking, but I decided to install gdm instead of lightdm.
I had a serious h.u.m.a. moment, and tried to remove lightdm and install gdm at the same time.... not the smartest thing I've done. Midway through the process, the screen went completely black! I knew immediately what had gone wrong. I had killed my display manager! But I let it run for 30 - 45 minutes or so, and rebooted.
After completely booting up, I am left with a black login screen. I can log in either as root, or as user. Either way, I'm still at the black screen. If I try to reinstall gdm, yum tells me that it is already installed. If I invoke "gdm", I get a few lines of events scrolling, and then nothing. Just a blinking curser.
Could anyone be kind to a dumbass, and advise me how to recover without a complete re-install?

Thanks,

owa

You could trying using:

1.and then go ahead with yum groupinstall with anything that says Desktop or X windows. Here is how you can do:

2.Just copy paste the group name from the output of group list. Don't forget to use double quotes.

Thanks,T3RM1NVT0R. As soon as I get a chance, I'll reboot to FC20, and give this advice a shot. I'll post back with the results.

BTW, thanks for the really quick response. I appreciate it.

owa

OK. I first, as root, entered;
# yum grouplist

Without a gui, I had no easy way to copy/paste the output. But it showed, among other non-relevant things, "MATE DESKTOP", "GNOME DESKTOP", and an unspecified "WINDOWS MANAGER". So, I entered;
# yum groupinstall "MATE DESKTOP" "WINDOWS MANAGER"

It installed two small components from mate desktop which hadn't been installed, and it decried there were no candidates for "WINDOWS MANAGER". I rebooted, and it came to a black-screen login prompt. I logged in, first as user, then as root, and entered;
$ startx
Then the mate desktop launched, and everything seemed to work. I rebooted again, and was returned to the same black-screen login prompt. So, I logged in as root, and entered;
# startx
This produced the same results. Repeated reboots always brought me to the cli login prompt.

So, I installed;
# yum groupinstall "GNOME DESKTOP". Reboot again brought me to the cli login prompt, and it arbitrarily forced me to use the Gnome Desktop. Frustrated, this morning, I reinstalled FC20 with Mate DE. As it is expected to reach 108F today, I just rebooted into my Linux Mint 17, and went out and mowed the lawn and did all the yard work at 7:00 a.m. I'll play around with FC20 later on.

All of this does bring me to a question. Although I must take full ownership of my problem, in my 10 + years of using various distributions of Linux, whenever I asked a package manager to do something which might prove harmful, the package manager usually gave me at least a warning popup message, asking, "Are you sure you really want to do this? If you do, .......and so on" I'm a bit surprised that yum or yumex, which I was using, didn't offer some sort of caution or warning that I might end up without any display manager. But, I suppose we should not expect the operating system to protect us from our own over-zealous, and mis-guided enthusiasm all of the time! I've concluded that, not only with computers and operating systems, but with life in general, if I'm truly honest with myself, most of the things which I might want to complain about have been, at least in part, my own damn fault!!

owa

you're welcome.

Well yum does list what are the dependencies that will get removed with parent package but it does not explicitly tell you that it could be fatal. I mean that is something which we should be deciding. To sum up it will not warn you but does let you know what will be removed.

You're right, of course. As I said, "if I'm truly honest with myself, most of the things which I might want to complain about have been, at least in part, my own damn fault!!"

Thanks, again for your help. Have fun every chance you get!

owa