[SOLVED] Lost my Gnome/Mate gui

griffinmt · #1 13th January 2013, 02:59 AM

I installed Mate in my F17 system to check it out. Seems fine, but of course I ended up with lots of 'duplicate' applets in the menu. So, one by one I started to clean up the extra entries. After a significant number of PackageKit sessions, I felt that it was mostly done.
So I rebooted the system, but the primary session does not startup with the gui interface, just gives a blank screen. I can get to the other tty sessions and log on in text mode, but I do need to get the gui back.
The assumption is that I removed one or more key packages during the cleanup. So, how can I figure out what those packages might be so they can be re-installed? Any suggestions on the best way (via yum) to fix this puzzle?

TIA

christian_l · #2 13th January 2013, 05:24 AM

Are you saying you've removed some of the Gnome components? In that case, yum groupinstall "GNOME Desktop"' should give you back everything. If you've removed Mate components, see here on how to install all of those: http://forums.fedoraforum.org/showthread.php?t=276286. If you've removed menu items with Alacarte (AKA "Main Menu"), you can try its "Restore System Configuration" option.

griffinmt · #3 13th January 2013, 05:06 PM

I did the groupinstall for gnome and mate which reinstalled about 114 packages. But after reboot, no change to problem.

Wonder if I am missing any xserver components which would prevent the gui from appearing?

christian_l · #4 13th January 2013, 08:47 PM

Hm, any errors in /var/log/boot.log? Does gdm start (should say "[ OK ] Started GNOME Display Manager.")? Any errors in Xorg.0.log (grep -e WW -e EE /var/log/Xorg.0.log) or /var/log/messages?

Drolli · #5 13th January 2013, 09:12 PM

You may go back to the previous packages before you started the changes:

Code:

yum history
yum history list ID
yum history undo ID

This will only help if this is caused by a missing package.

griffinmt · #6 14th January 2013, 12:37 AM

Thanks.

Not sure how much history I can go back to, but I had made a number of distinct 'remove's before that fatal reboot.

Anyway, situation is a bit worse now, can't get to any of the other tty sessions. So I will reburn the dvd iso and do the repair from there. About to yum groupinstall 'X Windows Server'

---------- Post added at 07:37 PM ---------- Previous post was at 04:22 PM ----------

Booted up the live cd, mounted the old root partion and did a chroot to it.

Then I did a yum groupinstall 'X Window System'
followed by a reboot. That did the trick.

Now to go back and start removing all the redundand packages again

Thanks,