A little help please, desktop vanished
 

I rebooted my machine and when it came back up it asked me about cleaning out files and if I said yes I might lose data. Well I said yes since I just did some updating with Red Carpet thinking it was just old files. So anyway now when I boot up I have nothing. It boots to a blue screen and xterm is sitting right there and that's all I have. I can run programs, like Galeon right now to post this, from the command line. When xterm starts it is pointed to trent/home which is my user home. I have no idea what to do or what I did. I boot through Aurora and evertyhing passes with an OK. Somebody please help me out here.

BTW it's Mandrake 8.1

hello,
looks like you default desktop is missing. try editing the file ~.xinitrc or ~.Xclients-default depending on what mandrake uses to something the is not gnome - e.g. fvwm, or perhaps fvwm2 is more to you liking. If you don't have fvwm then try kde or fluxbox.

Help!
I have a similar problem. I'm using my root account in RH9 and I was modifying /etc/upfstab.conf.default so that it would detect/mount/whatever my windows hardrive automatically (I was repeating what worked for my USB flash memory). Next thing I know my desktop is gone, and I can't open any windows. My main panel is there and all the menus work, it's enough to get my work done, but I can't browse through my files (I'm too much of a newbie still to be happy with command line alone). Right clicking the desktop does nothing. Putting a "home" icon in the panel does nothing: a square expands and no window opens. My regular user account seems ok, so I'm not sure what I messed up.

switch to a text console by pressing ctrl-alt-F2. login and then as root:

init 3

this will kill your X. Become normal user again and do:

startx /usr/bin/startkde

if not too much was screwed up, this will start your kde. Once in kde, you should be able to restore the old defaults using the mandrake tools.
hope this helps.

ditto the two posts above.

look in /etc/inittab and see what the default runlevel is. It should be 4 to boot straight to X windows, using either gdm (gnome desktop manager) or kdm (kde desktop manager)

xdm is also another manager, (X -windows desktop manager)

-Shade