On a student's Debian system, I ran some updates and resulted in gdm refusing to start, with the error message that shows a picture of a sad computer and a message says:
Oh no! Something has gone wrong. A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please contact a system administrator. I'm pretty sure this is due to a failure in the video drivers--some gnome3 packages installed and the nouveau video driver is not sufficient. And I am certain this problem happened when I tried to update to the network-manager from wheezy on his Squeeze-based system. I hoped some of you might help me think though the problem so I can fix that machine, next time it comes to the office. These are Dell latitude computers that have the Intel Centrino Ultimate 6300 wireless card. It has been an absolute curse. The firmware & support programs don't work well together. On my computer--where I've made all of these pieces work together-- there is a diverse set of packages. The solution to the problem requires kernel 3.4 from Debian experimental, and updating wpasupplicant and network manager and the iwlwifi firmware from Wheezy. When I did this to my system about 6 weeks ago, I am absolutely certain I saw the "Oh, No..." problem. But I can't remember the fix. This crash happens before GDM offers the list of users, so I don't understand how it could be related to a config problem in a user account. Right? Everybody says "check ~/.xsession-errors", but why? When that problem happens, it IS possible to Alt-Ctl-F1 to log in on a VT. I can get to a VT, but get the networking to start without network manager (I'm GUI dependent, it seems). In the olden days, I'd just remove gdm and then run "startx" from the command line to start X11. But now, as far as I can tell, the Gnome system pre-supposes a session-managed display manager. -- Paul E. Johnson Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director 1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods University of Kansas University of Kansas http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu -- To UNSUBSCRIBE, email to debian-user-requ...@lists.debian.org with a subject of "unsubscribe". Trouble? Contact listmas...@lists.debian.org Archive: http://lists.debian.org/CAErODj8NiLcseJfbjAOhArYLohr--QE2Z5T=06ogpsamz+s...@mail.gmail.com
