Found a fascinating new way to make linux not work

[aschueler]

I seem to have an advanced degree in this.

For other reasons (meaning: Don't Ask), I decided to reinstall my Debain distro (3.0 r2). The first installation went well.

For my 2nd, 3rd, and 4th (it has been a long day) installations, I keep hitting the same error when I try to start X-Windows.

Here it is: after entering startx,

/usr/bin/X11/X  no such file or directory

When I try xinit:

xinit:  no such file or directory (errno 2) no server "X" in path

Now, I pretty much followed the installation from the Debian installer, and added only a few things, and was careful about making sure I had dependencies and whatnot taken care of. I ran XF86Config, I can get to a prompt, etc.

When I look in the /usr/bin/X11 directory, sure enough there isn't X in there. When I look at the Debian install util (dselect), I am unsure what I did wrong or what I missed installing.

When it was installing, I did get the following error:

errors were encountered in processing:
  gdm
E: subprocess /usr/bin/dpkg returned an error code (1)

And went on to suggest I run dpkg --configure KDM, which I tried, but then I get the message that KDM is already up and running.

Any ideas where I missed installing (I presume that's what I did) X, or at the minimum how I get the sucker going?

Thanks a million.

[Mikey]

I'd end up trying to do a apt-get remove then an apt-get install of the xwindow packages. Assuming you've got apt-get installed, otherwise use whatever package manager debian has.

[aschueler]

actually I just figured out what I needed to do:

For some reason (I don't know why) the x windows core did not fully install.

I tapped in apt-get install x-windows-system-core and it worked; now to get my video and sound working...heh, I will be back!