Hi,

I just upgraded the packages on SID (apt-get update) and it worked flawlessly (the only package that has held back was a digikam extras library or something). anyways. after reloading X (or restarting the system) I can't seem to get Gnome to start anymore.

There is no error message I just get the grey screen (with the black X mouse cursor) and the system just sits there.

I tried running "startx" from the CLI as root but that also doesn't provide me with a reason why it's not doing anything.

I tried booting into KDE 3.5 and that worked but a lot of programs don't seem to be starting (like Galeon and Firefox).

Does anybody know what could cause this ?

Sounds like gnome-core may be missing? You X server is starting obviously. One of the gnome packages has to be missing or be having some issue. (By the way if you run unstable expect for that type of thing to happen)

Yeah, I should have sticked with Stable for my laptop
but I needed some updated packages from SID to get some stuff working.

Anyways I did apt-get install gnome and it installed some extra packages (but gnome-core) seems to be installed.

Ah well, let's hope it's fixed like most problems with Debian (within 24-48 hours).

Thanks for the reply.

Upgrading directly from Sarge to Sid is just asking for trouble. What happened to Etch? Most likely, your X interfaces are messed up because of the differences between Xfree and Xorg. Etch or Sid expects you to have Xorg. You could try reinstalling gdm.

If it was me, I'd just do a complete fresh install of Etch and be done with it.

Crap yea I forgot about that, there was a big issue going to xorg in debian, dont remem what the fix was. I think I googled and found something on it in the debian archives.

I think you misunderstand my previous post.

Yes, I upgraded to SID but that was a few months ago already and I did have the Xfree vs Xorg problems but they were solved.

The system has been running very well for a few months now until today.

Did you try that?

Yes but it doesn't seem to work.

After reading some other posts I found on the internet I tried running "gnome-session" from the commandline and it results in the following error :

that looks weird to me since from what I've found was that this problem occures when a "user" wants to start X but I also get it when I'm logged-in as root (not SU or anything like that).

Also KDE and Enlightenment seem to start but none of the GTK based programs like gnome-terminal, galeon and even firefox and mozilla won't start.

Start KDE, run xterm or Konsole, type gnome-<tab>, pick a random application, e.g. gnome-terminal or gnome-control-center.

What's the output of this command on the console?

If it says library <bla> is missing, issue
apt-cache search <bla>
apt-get install --reinstall <result from above>

I had something similar a while ago on sid and I did

apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
apt-get install --reinstall gnome-desktop-environment

to get it back, your mileage may vary.

hth,

herd

Well some gnome apps just started (gnome-wm for example) and others just did nothing (like gnome-session) I also figured out that even on a system that has a working Gnome the command gnome-session in the CLI gives the same error message.

Anyways I decided to reinstall Debian so I downloaded CD1 of the weeksly Etch snapshot and used that to install Etch instead of SID.

so I guess I'll just stick with Testing for now.