No GUI!

[Pijuvwy]

Hi everybody. I know really little about Linux, but as my Windoze is out of action, it was time for me to learn to use my Mepis partition. It was working fine till yesterday, but I was trying to learn about upgrading and downloading, and I messed something up.

I was using Kpackage, and due to some error messages while trying to upgrade Firefox, I attempted to upgrade the dependencies one at a time. When I re-started, I only get a command-line interface, not a GUI.

I am able to login as root, but don't know what to do next.

Can anybody help, please?

I had this Mepis installed by the supplier of the laptop. But I once had a Mepis CD, somewhere...

When I start up in Linux I get:



Welcome to Mepis!

Empty log files... done



etc, all looks pretty normal, goes on for a few pages, then:




Starting K Display Manager: kdm

MEPIS Linux testing/unstable mepis1 tty1

mepis1 login:




Then after I login and password...



Most of the programs included with MEPIS Linux are freely
redistributable: the exact distribution terms for each program
are described in the individual files in /usr/share/doc/*/copyright

MEPIS Linux comes with ABSOLUTELY NO WARRANTY, to the extent
permitted by applicable law.



then it changes to RED text...


root@tty1[~]#





And that's as far as I can get usefully. It responds to "help" or "dir" etc.

[budman7]

Try running the command

startx

Then posting the error that you will recieve.
That will help in diagnosing what went wrong.

[Pijuvwy]

root@tty1[~]# startx
-bash: startx: command not found
root@tty1[~]#

[Pijuvwy]

I got some interesting messages when I tried typing "startkde" including...



xsetroot: command not found
mkfontdir: command not found
xset: command not found
ksplash: cannot connect to X server
kdeinit: Aborting. $DISPLAY is not set.

The following installation problem was detected
while trying to start KDE:

Could not find 'iceauth' in path.

KDE is unable to start.
ksmserver: Cannot connect to X server

[budman7]

As root do this.

nano /home/yourusername/.xinitrc

Put this one line in there.

exec startkde

Hit Ctrl + x to quit and save your work.
Then

su - yourusername

Then try startx.

[Pijuvwy]

-bash: nano: command not found

[budman7]

I can't believe that Mepisdoesn't have such an easy text editor as nano.
If you know of a different text editor that Mepis has, try that.
If you don't know, do

apt-get install nano

[vixenk]

I can't believe that Mepisdoesn't have such an easy text editor as nano.

Mepis DOES have Nano, normally. :S

[Pijuvwy]

I'm getting a new Mepis disk from local store, so I'll hopefully have no more problems. Or a set of entirely different problems. I'll let you know. Thanks for the help.

[lfever]

I have experienced the same thing and the only way I could get my system back up was to reinstall.
I'm sure there must be a less drastic way to do so but I don't know what it is as I am new to linux.

SimplyMepis 3.4-3