So, I was troubleshooting an audio problem in fedora when all of the sudden it takes me to a black screen with a blinking cursor. Key inputs doing nothing, as such I restart. When I get past all the passwords, I am greeted with a screen that is just terminal, no way to get out all I can do is terminal commands. After a couple Google searches I disable gdm and enable kdm, restart and no full terminal. Instead there is a strange login screen that I've never seen and when I try to login it tell me something has gone wrong (no sh**). At this point I am stuck and nothing I do is affecting what is being displayed or if I can or cannot login. I not quite sure what to do at this point....at this point I am already debating a fresh install. If anyone has any ideas I would ask if it would be possible to share them.
Any help is greatly appreciated
Take a pic with your phone and post what it looks like
Here are the pics, I took a couple to explain the situation as best I could. Sorry that the pics are shaky, my hands are not exactly the steadiest.
Can you get gdm back? If yes: your problem seems to be caused by an issue of the X server. You probably just need to restart it - if you're lucky. Here's how you do it:
NOTE: I wrote this guide for Ubuntu based distros. Maybe you need to tweak that a bit.
So after following your advice I was prompted by another oh no screen, as such I rebooted, this time however after putting all the passwords all I get is a black screen with a blinking cursor.... key inputs again being futile.
OK. Then try to press Ctrl+ALT+F2 to get a new TTY session? Is that possible? - Hopefully it is.
Well I got into a new session, granted not with Ctrl+ALT+F2, but either way I managed it... although I'm not exactly sure what else I can do....
OK. Try: sudo startx
(to start the X server)
The same thing as before, an oh no screen.
OK. Try to get back to your TTY session where you executed sudo startx.
There you should see some log info in your shell session. Does it give you any clue what might be wrong?
I do believe that dnf has a fairly good dependency solver now.
If you hit control alt f3 or something to get you to a terminal, you could log in and run a distro update/upgrade.
DNF SHOULD (key word there) find any missing packages and reinstall them. If that does not work, you can just uninstall gnome and reinstall it without loosing your files and what not
This is what it returns, and I tried accessing the log file to no avail, this to me just looks like a normal startup, but yeah there it is.
An update just returns the fact that for whatever reason all dependencies are already resolved so no luck there. In regards to reinstalling gnome that probably will work but I am personally at a loss on how to.
It's a bit strange that it says "waiting for X server to shut down".
OK. Then try: sudo apt-get update; sudo apt-get dist-upgrade; sudo reboot
Since that seems to make my last idea of an update/upgrade/reboot pointless, try: sudo apt-get purge xserver-xorg-core; sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg-core
beat you to it mate : D
but yeah, I am kind of surprised that did not work for him.
Also, it would be sudo dnf update --refresh and sudo dnf system-upgrade reboot
sudo dnf install gnome -y
After inputing that it can't find gnome as a package, most likely cause it probably has a different name for whatever reason
oh, try this
dnf search gnome
it should be something like gnome-session or something along those lines
I don't believe that purge is an option for dnf but if purge does what I believe it does, would a reinstall of xserver-xorg-core be an equivalent?
Yes, it should.