On 11/20/2011 08:38 PM, Avi Greenbury wrote:
Pete wrote:
I was playing around trying to install gnome 3 onto my Ubuntu 11.04
system, this was done via synaptic, since then I have been given the
choice of 'gnome classic, KDE (plasma workspace), Arios (my original
system based on Ubuntu), recovery console, unity 2d, user defined
session' at login but none of them are my original desktop session
and most give the error 'unable to load session' with the option to
logout.
This is because everything Gnome 2 based has been upgraded to Gnome
3, including software libraries and configuration files.
I have 'completely removed' gnome 3 in synaptic but it only removed 1
package not the 139 it installed when I installed it!
Most desktop environments are installed with a 'metapackage', which is
simply an empty package that depends upon all the components of the
desktop environment - not just 'Gnome' but also, say, the gnome
configuration panel, and a mail client, and an IM client and the like.
When you installed that package, it depended upon 139 others, so they
were all pulled in, too. When you uninstalled it, the dependencies
weren't automatically removed; the default behaviour is to not remove
things it's not been asked to remove.
1/ most important how do I recover my original desktop session?
The only sure way that I know of is to reinstall. Your configuration
was clobbered by the Gnome 3 configuration on upgrade, so even were you
to sort the softwary bits out, you'd still be configuring
essentially from scratch.
2/ why did it install the KDE desktop environment without me even
trying?
That's hard to tell without knowing *exactly* what you did to upgrade
to Gnome3. Which repository did you use, which commands did you run,
etc?
3/ is there a way of listing the packages installed on a
certain date/time to ensure I can manually remove them with the hope
of restoring my system to it's previous state?
You can mess around with /var/log/dpkg.log to get that data, but bear
in mind that 'unpacking' is both part of initial install, and upgrade.
thanks in advance (and no I will not be trying to install extra
desktops on an existing system again, I will dual boot in future!!)
Everything in the standard Ubuntu repositories (that is, main, universe
and multiverse) will work fine. Conflicts can occur when you use PPAs
and other additional repositories - they're in PPAs and other
repositories precisely because they conflict with someting in the
standard repositories.
Other desktop environments should be fine, but running two different
major versions of the same program (as you did with Gnome) is always a
recipe for problems.
Hi,
Thanks for the responses, not what I wanted to hear but thanks anyway.
Since I posted the original queries I have found /.synaptic/logs with a
text file handily called by the date and time! from this I have been
through synaptic and removed all the packages that were installed at the
time, and I am now left with no working desktop environment at all, but
i am dumped into a tty shell (so the system is still there in text
mode!) There I tried a 'sudo apt-get -f install', which did not fix any
broken dependencies and informed me that there were packages installed
that were no longer required, including t-bird and smplayer which i
still would use given a desktop to use them through! I then tried
restarting gdm and was informed it was not installed, so I installed via
apt-get, now I get a choice of: AriOs which returns 'Failed to\load
session "arios 3d"' with a button to log out. Gnome classic which
returns a similar message, Recovery console which exits to shell, or
user defined session which does appear to try, but hangs on blue screen
with mouse cursor (arrow) and nothing else!
So if there is a way of reinstalling my original desktop (gnome 2.32
with awn window manager) I would be very grateful!
In response to Avi who asked what I did to upgrade, I added the gnome 3
ppa in Ubuntu Tweak, then went into synaptic and in the quick search i
typed gnome 3 and installed the only response it gave! I was expecting a
choice at login (which I did get, but not what I was expecting!)
please note this post was sent from my friends computer as when I type
thunderbird into the shell it says no screen specified!
Thanks again
regards
Pete
--
[email protected]
https://lists.ubuntu.com/mailman/listinfo/ubuntu-uk
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/UKTeam/
