(Solved) Latest Updates Break System

[ghostdawg]

Hello all. I have LMDE Gnome2 edition installed and it have been running very well up till I did the latest updates earlier today. I've been busy lately and haven't used this system for over a week and today did the update and now having issues with getting a normal login.

It showed it was going to install over a 100 updates and when it was done, I saw a message about an issue with Gconf2 & Pidgin wasn't installed/configured correctly, or something similar. I'm sorry but I'm currently at work and didn't get the exact messages.

I rebooted the machine and thought it would clear things up if I ran update/upgrade again but once I logged in I had a black session, only the mouse seems to be active. At this point I turned the computer off and got ready for work.

Any ideas on what could be the problem?

Thnx.

[craigevil]

See http://forum.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=77504

Basically you need to run:
apt-get -f install
apt-get dist-upgrade

Really wish LMDE came with smxi it tends to take care of little things like this.

[h2-1]

usually a black screen means xorg updated and a non free driver needs to be reinstalled. If the system is intel or was using nouveau or radeon, then hard to say, can be many things, but doing a blank update in X without even knowing what was being updated, then leaving it unattended, isn't a very good idea. That's not a good idea in windows either as a general practice, or any other OS.

[Roken]

As has been said, the blank screen is generally indicative of xorg problems, and more specifically gfx driver problems. A simple solution to getting the desktop back is to boot recovery mode and4:

Code: Select all

sudo mv /etc/X11/xorg.conf /etc/X11/xorg.conf.bak

Reboot and X should boot normally, albeit with non-propriety drivers. After reboot you can reinstall the gfx drivers.

[rhodry]

Really wish LMDE came with smxi it tends to take care of little things like this.

# as root, run the following command
cd /usr/local/bin && wget -Nc smxi.org/smxi.zip && unzip smxi.zip && smxi

Now it does!!

How did we ever survive without it? It is on every Debian based system I install!

rhodry.

[ghostdawg]

See http://forum.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=141&t=77504

Basically you need to run:
apt-get -f install
apt-get dist-upgrade

Really wish LMDE came with smxi it tends to take care of little things like this.

That fixed it. Though it seems to have been a Gnome issue, I guess along with gconf2 didn't install completely. I was able to run Openbox and then run the apt-get -f install commands to fix it.

I'll look into smxi also. So smxi will stop the breakage that may occur every so often?

Thnx.