Installed Gnome after LXDE ... now boots to terminal only?

[Miller88]

I installed Debian Squeeze with LXDE from USB. I found that I really didn't like LXDE and installed Gnome from Tasksel.

It worked a few times - I'd have to select my desktop environment.

Now, I get brought to a terminal. If I do startx it will boot to LXDE but nowhere do I have the option for gnome

Help?

[hazel]

Well, if you can use startx, your desktop is OK. The problem must lie with gdm, the Gnome program which handles the graphical login. I'm not sure where gdm writes its error log but a quick look at its configuration file in /etc/X11/gdm should tell you. Then you would be on the way to finding out what error is stopping it from running.

startx runs a script in your home directory called .xinitrc. Because this is a personal file, it wasn't changed when you installed Gnome. You need to change the last line of the script to load Gnome instead of LXDE; I think the command is exec gnome-session.

[BoDiddley]

Why not remove lxde?

I did a build without a desktop,and then installed LXDE. LXDE was running with GDM.

I did not like how gdm was functioning with screensavers, so I installed XDM, and then uninstalled GDM.

In my limited Linux experience, long-standing computer general knowledge... If you re going to replace something - replace it entirely, without maintaining the "fail-safe" unwanted version.