Hi all! I was just upgrading from Gnome 2.4 to Gnome 2.6, along with a bunch of other gnome packages on Swaret. Anyway, once everything was done finally installing itself, the pc locked up. I rebooted and Slackware automatically went through the integrity check and rebooted again. Well, now it boots up into the "X Session Manager" but not the login screen. It flashes the nVidia screen and then I just get a plain speckled type screen with the mouse/pointer on it (moveable).
Anyone have any idea what I've done to my system?

yea, you used swaret......
Swaret has a BAD habit of not updating all the required shared libraries
and/or not completely updating all the needed packages..........

If you don't believe me, just do a Search of the LQ forum
and you will see ALL of Swarets problems first hand.........

So what do you think I should do? Somehow get into it Runlevel 3 or 4, I would guess, would be the first step?

Press ctrl+alt+f6 and you should hopefully get a plain console you can log into. Then change the default run level in /etc/inittab to 3 until you have the problem resolved. Try running "swaret --dep" a couple of times to do a dependency check and hopefully download and install any missing libraries you might have. Swaret's not that bad IMHO, I downloaded and had a look at Gnome 2.6 a couple of days ago - I didn't like it very much at all, but the installation was fine.

Okay, I hit Ctr+Alt+F6 and was able to get to a text login. Once, I logged in as root, I did a "swaret --dep". After it was finally done, it did install some dependencies but then it also left a list of about 15 dependencies that it couldn't find, saying something like "Search for "filename.so . need for so_and_so_program". But I know that it had a big list of of these "not found" dependencies before I upgraded gnome.

Anyway, after I did that I went ahead tried to start up the xserver. This is what I got...




root@slackware:~# startx

Fatal server error:
is already active for display 0
If this server is no longer running, remove /tmp/.X0-lock
and start again.

When reporting a problem related to a server crash, please send
the full server output, not just the last messages.
Please report problems to xfree86@xfree86.org.

Xlib: connection to ":0.0" refused by server
Xlib: Invalid MIT-MAGIC-COOKIE-1 key
giving up.
xinit: unable to connect to X server
xinit: No such process (errno 3): server error.
root@slackware:~#


After this, I thought maybe my XFree86 stuff got messed up so I "swaret --reinstall xfree", installing about 10 XFree86 things. After that I tried to "startx" again but still didn't work.

I'm thinking about maybe reinstalling gnome and hopefully fixing what I may have screwed up.

What happened was that while you were logged in on terminal 6, the xserver was still active on terminal 7, hence not being able to start another instance of it. You need to kill the xserver and maybe delete /tmp/.X0-lock before you can start a new xserver. You might also need to run xf86config again, if you reinstalled all the X packages.

to kill your X session just go back to ctrl-alt-f7 and hit ctrl-alt-backspace then restart it. its better to exit though.