About a month ago I installed testing amd64 on a brand new hard disk for my Thinkpad, planning on migrating from Jaunty to Debian. I kept my old Jaunty hard disk untouched. I used the Jaunty disk as a source of config files as I installed the applications I need, plus I wanted it available just in case my migration to Debian did not go well.
After several days of installing and configuring things I suddenly lost metacity and gnome-panel. That is, upon rebooting I got a blank screen. Even without the window manager or gnome-panel you can right-click on the screen and create a launcher. I created a launcher for gnome-terminal. From the terminal I was able to start metacity and gnome-panel. However two days of poking failed to get metacity and gnome-panel to start automatically on rebooting. I just couldn't figure out where they started from. Eventually I had work I needed to get done, so I put the Jaunty hard disk back in the computer and left my migration to Debian for another day. That day arrived a few days ago. I decided start over from scratch. I used the netinst CD and reinstalled completely, reformatting the new disk. Until yesterday afternoon I spent my time installing and configuring as I did before. Everything was running great. I had just a couple problems left to resolve. Then I decided to reboot. And then it happened again - no metacity or gnome panel. Only this time I couldn't right-click on the desktop and create a launcher either. I could boot into Recovery Mode, but you can't start an X program from there. A local friend suggested to boot to Recovery Mode and then install XFCE. I did so. And when I rebooted I found the option to use XFCE instead of Gnome. When XFCE came up I had a normal desktop with window manager and panels. Yay! So at least this time around I am back and I have things running. I have XFCE fixed up to my taste, but I want Gnome back. I still can't log in to Gnome without losing the window manager and panels. So this long story boils down to two questions: 1) How can I fix Gnome? What part of the configuration starts metacity and gnome-panel when the user logs in? Note that I'll have to do this manually from XFCE, because I can't even get a terminal running in Gnome. 2) How the heck did this happen? I did hundreds of things before I rebooted - which thing messed up Gnome? Can someone suggest a way to find out what I did to cause this so I can file a bug report or at least avoid doing it again? -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org
