this post was submitted on 14 Oct 2023

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Help, no session?! (lemmy.world)

submitted 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

31 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I just installed a cisco vpn. And after installing some required libraries I got the option to get rid of "unused" libraries. So I did 'sudo apt autoremove' as suggested. After I rebooted I no longer have a either x11 or wayland in the drop down menu. I can no longer login via the GUI.

Running latest Debian.

Where did I go wrong? Any immediate help appreciated 🙏

Edit: The Cisco VPN required me to download libkit2gtk-4.0-dev if that has anything to do with it?

Edit2: Thanks for all the tips and help. Won't happen again 😅

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[–] [email protected] 22 points 1 year ago

[–] [email protected] 18 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Try to switch to console (ctr alt f2) and run xsession via startx. Or just try to install some meta package from console, like gnome-desktop (like sudo apt install gnome-desktop)

Anyway console (tty) is all what you have now and it should be rnough for restoring the system.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Startx just gives me a straight black screen, no cursor or nothing.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Try reinstalling the DE as someone else has suggested.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Got network issues after the reboot too, so can't install anything atm.. 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You clearly have borked your system. Save whatever data you still need and do a fresh install.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah I really have.. Kinda crazy to me that it can happen so quickly haha, but yiu live and you learn. Luckily I always have my important stuff in the cloud.

[–] [email protected] 14 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

See if you can just re-install a desktop environment. Try sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome (or maybe cinnamon-desktop-environment, whichever you prefer). Then reboot, see if that does anything.

[–] [email protected] 13 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You learned the hard way to always check what's going to be removed when using autoremove didn't ya. I did too, years ago. Must have been on Hardy Heron. It's a mistake you only make once... 😬

The solutions given by other people seem good enough. Reinstalling your Desktop Environment (in Ubuntu's case, Gnome) should fix it. But it's not all too clear what else you may have removed alongside.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah man... Was really silly of me thinking back at it.. I saw a big list of this, thought to myswlf "oh that's odd.." and proceeded the action... Big silly. So yeah hopefully an immutable system will also help against this and make me follow standards a bit better 😅

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

I'll be honest, I've been using Linux for ~16 years now, I've yet to switch to immutable systems. I see the appeal, I've been toying around with NixOS and Tumbleweed on VMs, but for my main machines (which I use for work), it's an additional learning curve I've yet to spend enough time on to feel confident I won't get stuck fixing my OS on a work day lol

[–] [email protected] 11 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Though to late to help you, when you get it working again, install Timeshift, so that instead of faffing around to try and suss out what went wrong, you just start timeshift -- restore from the console and a couple of minutes later you'll have your working setup back. It's saved my bacon quite a few times in the last couple of years, especially when you can't login to your DE.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 1 year ago

This is great, I've been far to lazy with backup solutions. Time shift is duly noted 📝

[–] [email protected] 7 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

Whenever you install or remove software, be sure to read through what's being removed. You don't want to accidentally uninstall something important. This is very unlikely to happen with official Debian packages, but you should be especially careful when installing packages outside of Debian's repo, as they may not be fully compatible with your version of Debian.

In any case, I'd log in to a tty (ctrl-alt-any function key) and install whichever desktop environment you had before using apt.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

But rather crazy that one "recommend" command from debian would do this? I'm still q bit new to the Desktop world of Linux.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago

linux distros assume that the your know what they are doing, so it show what it gonna do, and do it if the user say yes, even if it removing the entire system, because some users do that(removing and installing other system) so always be careful, especially with sudo commands, that why they ask for password, terminal is a powerfull tool, that why you can't runs these commands from GUI

[–] [email protected] 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I'm assuming I need to reconfigure my desk opt environment too?

[–] [email protected] -2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

I recommend checking out Fedora Silverblue and other immutable distros, or, at least, use more containerization like Flatpak and Distrobox.

When the programs are all in their own small environment, they at least don't affect the base system like deleting the DE or other important packages when something goes wrong or changes dependencies.

But, in your case, try switching to tty (CTRL + ALT + F2) and installing the DE base (e.g. gnome-desktop). This will co-install all other dependencies, like X11.

Remember to always backup everything and reading thoroughly when using sudo in the future. And, maybe, check out the tips from my first paragraph :)

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yeah I'm thinking about getting OpenSuse Slowroll!

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Good choice, but remember to always containerize things, use flatpak and distrobox when possible, opensuse is excellent as a base distro to build your setup on top of, but i wouldnt say so much to actually be your setup. Opensuse user speaking

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Thanks yeah! What do you do when there isn't a flatpak available for what you need?

I my case I needed Ciso Anyconnect for Uni VPN.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

I would try using it inside an archlinux distrobox, and install using yay or some other aur helper