Re: no desktop

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

On Sat, Dec 23, 2000 at 04:30:55PM -0500 or thereabouts, David McGlone wrote:

> Cc: gnome list <gnome-list gnome org>, "redhat-list redhat com" <redhat-list redhat com>

(I suppose with a cc line like that there is little point in replying to
the substance of the message.) 

> there certainly is a way out of it, its pretty simple even a dumb guy like
> me could get out of this one, just throw away Red Hat 7 and your problems
> will be solved. LOL

I'm laughing so hard.

I was catching up with less than a week's backlog, which is still quite
a lot. And weirdly, I was thinking how civilised gnome-list is by 
comparison with other very large lists where the background of people 
was so varied. Then I read that. 

Thank you for reminding me that life is never that simple. 

> On Sat, 23 Dec 2000, lee wrote:
> > i was playing around with ibms websphere for linux and
> > gimp..........other stuff running too along with nestcape which was prob
> > my worst mistake :)lol..
> > anyway my HD starting running endlessly and finally shutdown everything
> > and tried to reboot...but upon reboot no longer does gdm come
> > up............only a purplish dark? screen and it locks up...........
> > i tried redoing  Xconfigurator no luck..
> > running redhat7
> > I know there's a way out of this i just don't recall as this hardly ever
> > happens

I don't have any obvious ideas here, sorry. Except that I wonder what
this bit means: "and finally shutdown everything and tried to reboot". 
Did you hit the power switch, or have I misunderstood? 

If you are booting into X (which I assume, if you're looking for
gdm to occur) I suppose a first start is to switch to another virtual
console (with alt-F1, alt-F2, etc. You may need control-alt-F1 etc
if you are starting from a screen which is running (or trying to run)
X). You can login at the text prompt that way and start to poke about.
If you did hit the power switch, then look to see whether you have 
acquired files in a directory called /lost+found, which is where Linux 
puts semi-rescued files when it has the contents but doesn't know where 
the file should live. I'm not very clear on what you -do- with it, as I
have avoided meeting this situation :) But seeing whether that directory
has got content in it might be a quick diagnostic. "ps ax | grep gdm"
or "ps ax | grep X" will tell you whether X is actually running.

A lesson you always learn too late, alas, is "whilst everything is
working fine, make a copy of various important /etc files and put them
on a floppy somewhere, and include XF86Config in that list". (Other
candidates are "anything you have changed in /etc at all, if you're
like me and mess with it happily so that all your accounts have the
same defaults :)) 

Telsa