I recently decided to take a chance and install some unstable upgrades (I love unstable things). So I upgraded many of my applications via apt-get. One of the big things I upgraded was libc6. I think that my be the issue, not sure. After the upgrades, I had many many problems. I was able to fix nearly all of them in different ways, many by downgrading, others by changing permissions (somehow root stole my home folder and made it read-only to regular users). However, one issue still remains: gnome will not start. X was upgraded, but I removed and reinstalled a stable version. When I run 'startx' I get an X display (checkerboard) with the pointer in the middle. I can not move the pointer and no windows manager loads. If I run "startx gnome-session" or "startx gdm" or "xinit /usr/bin/gnome-session" the screen flashes and I am returned to the console. any X errors are already off the screen by the time I get back to the console, and i couldnt redirect the output to a file for some reason.
I tried reinstalling x, gnome, gdm, and xterm, but it didnt help. Also, i tried to downgrade libc6 and it wanted to remove coreutils and apt and other very important packages. So I havent done that.
Any advice?
Thanks in advance everybody, I feel pretty dumb right now, I'd like to get this working again.
I also posted on daniweb, heres a link to my daniweb post:
http://www.daniweb.com/forums/thread182594.html
I'm also posting here because linuxquestions is much more linux focused and frequented (besides mine, last daniweb topic on the linux software forum was from feb. 10)