[BozemanLUG] problems loading "x"

[Scott Dowdle]

Greetings,

----- Original Message -----
> does anyone have any experience or ideas that I could try to finish
> fixing my computer?

What graphical login manager are you using?  I assume it supports sessions. Sessions lets you pick, in the event you have multiple window managers or desktop environments installed, which window manager / desktop environment session you want.  Verify what the default is that you are getting... and if it isn't what you want, make sure to pick the desired one.  It may be that there are one or two other options there that you didn't know about and you weren't getting what you expected... and it was broken for some reason.

If that isn't it, maybe some file in your home directory that defines your default desktop environment session (not sure what it is off the top of my head) has gotten corrupted or something... so it isn't loading.

I have also seen a full disk keep people from logging in but I doubt that is the case or you would have noticed it when you bypassed your graphical login manager.

Another thing to try is to create a new account on the system and see if the new user has trouble logging in too.  If not, then it is something with your user's environment configuration.  Or maybe your login manager had a bad update or a config file corruption.  If you have to, you can install an alternative graphical login manager.  On systemd-based systems you can switch login managers with:

systemctl enable --force lightdm.service (replace "lightdm" with the appropriate login manager service name)

...and then reboot or switch to text (systemctl isolate multi-user.target) and back to graphical (systemctl isolate graphical.target)

Lastly, I assume you haven't done something to break it.  A week ago I applied a setting change in my ~/.profile in an effort to address a bug (that has since been fixed) in x2go... and I didn't know it but that change totally broke my X login.  Not realizing what I had done (that I had broken it myself)... and seeing that other accounts could login just fine... since it was an upgrade from Fedora 23 to Fedora 24 pre-release... I decided to do a clean install... still retaining my home directory.  What do you think happened?  Of course it was still broken after the fresh install because the offending stuff was still in my ~/.profile... but I finally pulled my head out and reverted the change and my login worked again.  Now I feel stupid for doing the clean install... but given that I wanted to test a recent remix build, I don't feel too bad. :)

Anyway, hopefully one of those strategies will help.

TYL,
-- 
Scott Dowdle
704 Church Street
Belgrade, MT 59714
(406)388-0827 [home]
(406)994-3931 [work]