Debian11 stopped booting into Desktop, now only starts a tty
by somanyquestions from LinuxQuestions.org on (#6E8Y9)
I'm not sure how this exactly happened, but my Debian11 with Gnome installation, that I run on a VirtualBox VM on a Windows host, which I've been using for over a year happily, some days ago stopped starting the Desktop environment.
It might have been after an update of Debian, or the host OS forced me to do an untimely reboot.
I also remember having uninstalled some experimentally installed Python, in an attempt to get some interesting project I found to build, but ended up with several slightly different Python installations, apparently.
Everything worked still after that, AFAIK. Not sure it can be related?
After the listing kernel starting steps in the beginning, i.e. mostly with green [Ok], the last entry I see is one red [FAILED], which says it can't start a proxyserver... seems to be from NGINX, not sure this is related...
Then I get a black text mode console, saying it was Debian, and tty1.
I can login fine, and see my stuff.
If I manually then enter "startx", no real desktop environment starts, but a mostly black screen without any status bars or anything, but in the left/upper part, one terminal window is open - this all looks like in a graphical environment, but there is no "start menu" type stuff or anything else than that one console window, it's not a proper desktop.
I have attached a Linux Live ISO to the VM's virtual DVD drive & ran fsck over the unmounted partition. No problems were listed, the operation ended successfully, and the behavior, then booting into that partition again, stays the same.
How can I diagnose the reason for the desktop no longer working?
It might have been after an update of Debian, or the host OS forced me to do an untimely reboot.
I also remember having uninstalled some experimentally installed Python, in an attempt to get some interesting project I found to build, but ended up with several slightly different Python installations, apparently.
Everything worked still after that, AFAIK. Not sure it can be related?
After the listing kernel starting steps in the beginning, i.e. mostly with green [Ok], the last entry I see is one red [FAILED], which says it can't start a proxyserver... seems to be from NGINX, not sure this is related...
Then I get a black text mode console, saying it was Debian, and tty1.
I can login fine, and see my stuff.
If I manually then enter "startx", no real desktop environment starts, but a mostly black screen without any status bars or anything, but in the left/upper part, one terminal window is open - this all looks like in a graphical environment, but there is no "start menu" type stuff or anything else than that one console window, it's not a proper desktop.
I have attached a Linux Live ISO to the VM's virtual DVD drive & ran fsck over the unmounted partition. No problems were listed, the operation ended successfully, and the behavior, then booting into that partition again, stays the same.
How can I diagnose the reason for the desktop no longer working?