Debian Etch GNOME stopped working after apt-get dist-upgrade

[zackboll]

My machine specs are AMD Opteron 175 running debian etch amd64.

On update manager, I saw that I had some updates to install. Update manage said that all the packages could not be installed and recommended that I run apt-get dist-upgrade. I did that, rebooted, and now cannot log into gnome desktop. It lets me enter username and password, then I get stuck on blank gray screen with mouse cursor.

I can log into a terminal as root via 'ctrl-alt-f1'

Does anyone have any recommendations I could try to fix my machine?

Do you think if I waited a couple days, running apt-get dist-upgrade in the terminal would fix this?

thanks for the help,
Zack

[zackboll]

Does anyone know the name of the configuration utility that runs during the install of debian?

Like when you choose [ ] Laptop [ ] Desktop [ ] Server
etc.

I thought maybe I could rerun that and re-download the files I needed.

thanks,
Zack

[zackboll]

Anyone, Im really lost on what to do?

I thought maybe I could run the debian-install configuration utility but I know what it is called.

Zack

[rong]

I think you are referring to base-config

[Vergil83]

try running

apt-get -f install

And see if any errors get corrected.

[zackboll]

thats, for the response, I ran apt-get -f install but it did not fix anything.


Is it possible that 'apt-get dist-upgrade' just uninstalled packages I needed for gnome to work?

could I just reinstall them manually with apt-get?

thanks,
Zack

[Vergil83]

It seems unlikely that something like that was occuring in etch now (only important fixes should be going into it..... however, doing apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade should get in new packages....say someone found the killed etch!). You can look at the file /var/log/dpkg.log it will tell you what has been installed or removed (the latest is at the end of the file). What happens if you login via terminal, kill x, and then try startx (it may print the errors..)

[zackboll]

Ok, so I tried

/etc/init.d/gdm stop
startx

I did not see any errors printed to screen, a blank gray screen showed up again but never progressed beyond that.


One other strange thing that I noticed was this. After I had done the apt-get dist-upgrade, many of the programs were missing from the debian menu, I noticed this because I was going to use grdesktop to remote into a windows machine and the program was no longer installed.

Zack

[zackboll]

It seems unlikely that something like that was occuring in etch now (only important fixes should be going into it..... however, doing apt-get update, apt-get dist-upgrade should get in new packages....say someone found the killed etch!). You can look at the file /var/log/dpkg.log it will tell you what has been installed or removed (the latest is at the end of the file). What happens if you login via terminal, kill x, and then try startx (it may print the errors..)

Thanks, Im back in business, at least X11 is working. I looked in the dpkg.log, and found that gnome-core was uninstalled around the time it stopped working.

All that I did was an apt-get upgrade-dist, so that has the power to remove things?

Almost all my programs are gone, I will need to read through that log when I have time to get them back. Is there any way I could just easy install all the base programs again?

thanks,
Zack

[Vergil83]

Yep, dist-upgrade can do that (that it is always a good idea to check what it is doing). You can get the whole gnome-desktop back by installing gnome-desktop-environment