Re: LM 12 LXDE Stable installation: No desktop, only a termi
Posted: Tue Mar 13, 2012 11:48 am
Help may be at hand for you, matt and mariku.
A much more sure fire fix to the problem follows, and it doesn't even involve messing about editing GRUB scripts.
Yes the laptop screenshots say it all, I've seen the terminal made of letter "U"s filling 2/3rds of the screen too !
And yes, following a successful live session with it on my big(-ger) desktop machine, I tried the resolution-setting approach with the current RC LXDE disk on my target machine, the 384 Mb Compaq, but ended up with a terminal again.
So setting the resolution won't always stop the Desktop from crashing.
Never daunted, after shutting down, I started it again, but in addition to the resolution fix, I changed the word "quiet" in the boot command to "verbose" and watched what happened.
Among other things a process called lxdm was being killed shortly before the session degenerated into a terminal session for the user "mint".
Now even I know that lxdm stands for Lightweight Xwindows Desktop Manager, and is probably what we are all wanting to see.
So I typed
lxdm [enter]
but was immediately told that "only root is allowed to use this program".
With not a lot to lose, I of course then said
sudo lxdm [enter]
Nobody gets given the password of the user "mint", so I wasn't even subjected to password formalities.
And the proper LXDE desktop did come up, and I was able to connect to the network and do a complete install, including a creating a revised partitioning scheme, with a bigger swap partition to make up for the small system RAM, and get LXDE onto my machine. The system even offered me the option to split the 39 Gb partition on which "/" had previously been mounted and create a double booting machine, but I'll save that facility for a later date when I might really need it.
Having done all that, I rebooted the machine, and it was OK, and then rebooted the machine again letting the distro disk boot the machine in live mode without doing any screen resolution settings or quiet/verbose switches, and here I am typing this in that live session.
All I had to do to make it work was to type (all in lowercase, of course):
sudo lxdm
when I got to the green and blue mint@mint ~ $ terminal prompt.
This may well work for you also, but it might be wise to set the resolution accordingly if your display can REALLY only manage SVGA (800x600), if only to protect the hardware. Or out of pride if you've got 1080p. I had one long ago (in 199x) that I believe DID get damaged by setting it to 1024 by 768 with a fast-ish refresh rate.
And I don't think lower res. than that is even supported - 640x480 anyone?
A much more sure fire fix to the problem follows, and it doesn't even involve messing about editing GRUB scripts.
Yes the laptop screenshots say it all, I've seen the terminal made of letter "U"s filling 2/3rds of the screen too !
And yes, following a successful live session with it on my big(-ger) desktop machine, I tried the resolution-setting approach with the current RC LXDE disk on my target machine, the 384 Mb Compaq, but ended up with a terminal again.
So setting the resolution won't always stop the Desktop from crashing.
Never daunted, after shutting down, I started it again, but in addition to the resolution fix, I changed the word "quiet" in the boot command to "verbose" and watched what happened.
Among other things a process called lxdm was being killed shortly before the session degenerated into a terminal session for the user "mint".
Now even I know that lxdm stands for Lightweight Xwindows Desktop Manager, and is probably what we are all wanting to see.
So I typed
lxdm [enter]
but was immediately told that "only root is allowed to use this program".
With not a lot to lose, I of course then said
sudo lxdm [enter]
Nobody gets given the password of the user "mint", so I wasn't even subjected to password formalities.
And the proper LXDE desktop did come up, and I was able to connect to the network and do a complete install, including a creating a revised partitioning scheme, with a bigger swap partition to make up for the small system RAM, and get LXDE onto my machine. The system even offered me the option to split the 39 Gb partition on which "/" had previously been mounted and create a double booting machine, but I'll save that facility for a later date when I might really need it.
Having done all that, I rebooted the machine, and it was OK, and then rebooted the machine again letting the distro disk boot the machine in live mode without doing any screen resolution settings or quiet/verbose switches, and here I am typing this in that live session.
All I had to do to make it work was to type (all in lowercase, of course):
sudo lxdm
when I got to the green and blue mint@mint ~ $ terminal prompt.
This may well work for you also, but it might be wise to set the resolution accordingly if your display can REALLY only manage SVGA (800x600), if only to protect the hardware. Or out of pride if you've got 1080p. I had one long ago (in 199x) that I believe DID get damaged by setting it to 1024 by 768 with a fast-ish refresh rate.
And I don't think lower res. than that is even supported - 640x480 anyone?