Arch Linux

antiG

Member

Registered: 2008-08-02

Posts: 10

Impossible to start the desktop environment after upgrade failure

Hello, after a long time without doing upgrades on my archlinux, I tried it once today. The upgrade failed, there were some packages conflit. Then nautilus and terminal were unable to be launched, so I restarted my PC. But when it's supposed to display the login window, the screen became black with a little clock instead of the mouse point.

Anyone can tell me how can I recovery my desktop environnement please?
If it isn't possible, how can I copy my data on a USB disk?

Thank you.

Redroar

Member

Registered: 2008-03-17

Posts: 200

Re: Impossible to start the desktop environment after upgrade failure

First question, is the gdm daemon in your rc.conf or your inittab?

If it is in the inittab, then append the number 3 to the end of the grub kernel init string. This will boot to runlevel 3, and leave you in a text console.

If it is in rc.conf...well, if you can Ctrl+Alt+Bkspc out of the X session with the little clock, then just run from the console, then that's easy. Otherwise switch to another console (Ctrl+Alt+F1) and log in, then try doing

killall gdm

As a last resort, you can always boot to single user by putting 1 at the end of the grub init string instead of 3.

After you are in the console, then try doing xinit /usr/bin/gnome-session and see if it works. If not, then you can try rolling back packages and whatnot.

Also, check /var/log/pacman.log and paste the failures you got.

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