[ubuntu-uk] Help gnome 3 broke my laptop!

[pete]

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