After installing a bunch of updates in Debian Etch, and restarting X I can no longer log in. I just get a blank blue screen. Is there a way to revert back to when everything worked?? Thanks.

edit:When I do 'startx' I get a blurry grayish screen with an "X" cursor and nothing else.

If this were Slackware I'd say "run X -configure and see how
the box works with the newly created /root/xorg.conf.new", but
it isn't, so I won't. Let's wait for a debian user to come by
and tell you the proper way.


Cheers,
Tink

This will reconfigure your xserver
dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xfree86

It says it's not installed.

edit: I put gksu infront of it and it said it could no open the display.

Try starting your computer in recovery mode and then use the command "startx" to start the GUI. If it doesn't work, it should at least provide you with a more explained description of your problem. Post that log here if you can so that we can help you with your problem.

Greetings!

I don't have a recovery mode, I have the default one, and single use, and both give me the same results.

Also I think I was misleading when I said "blue screen." Here's what happens:

I restart, wait for the splash screen, attempt to login in, then instead I having icons and stuff load it just stays on the default background screen. So wouldn't the problem be with GNOME? The odd thing to me is the updates I installed were a bunch that were required to get Deluge running so I just assumed everything would be fine. I got a few boxes pop up saying that something like "lib" will need to be manual restarted. So after they had finished I pressed Crl Alt Backspace and tried to log back in and couldn't.

It is xdm that spawns X. Go to a console (Ctrl+Alt+F2), log in as root and shut down xdm. Then use dpkg to fix your system.

Could you be more specific?

I think I need to revert back to pure Etch because the updates were almost all lenny/sid. Is there a way to do this? I wiped my source.list file so how could this been done? I'm so confused I just want to have my system fuctional again. I switched over to Debian from Ubuntu 2 days ago so I really have no clue what I'm doing. Any extra details and guidance you can give me would be greatly appreciated.

I did this and typed "killall xdm" and it returned "no process killed."


I'm thinking the problem is now has to do with the updates I installed being lenny/sid because at the top of the terminal it says "Debian GNU/Linux lenny/sid 449 tty2." Now why would it say that when I'm supposed to be running Etch?..

Downgrading? Probably not easy, if possible at all. Fixing it certainly is easier. Use your command line package management tools to verify the integrity of your installation and fix what needed.

How do I verify the integrity of the installation? And what am I fixing?.. I hardly know what I'm doing here...

Hey, what do you want to do - and what did you do? Did you run apt-get dist-upgrade?

I want to be able to login!! (=

I don't know exactly what I did. I ended up installing 10 minutes worth of stuff that came along with Deluge, and when I restarted X I could no longer log in any more.

Hopefully you switched to Debian for a reason? Like you want to learn more about Linux or something?
If so, great. Debian has comprehensive documentation. I'd recommend running apt-get update and apt-get upgrade commands and see if apt-get returns errors.

My source.list is empty. And apt-get upgrade does nothing.

When I tried to log into failsafe gnome, I get an error like "Could not find Gnome installation, running failsafe xterm."