Thomas H. George wrote: > I created the display problem. The HP box has only vga, no hdmi so I > experimented with the settings and chose an incompatable one resulting > in a black screen. I created a second user, tom2, and the display opened > normally for tom2.
That proves that the problem was limited to desktop configuration files saved in $HOME. > To recover my initial work I ran rsync -r --stats > /home/tom/ /home/tom2. All my data was recovered but on reboot the > display wouldn't open for either tom or tom2. The rsync overwrote your new working desktop config with the old broken desktop config. > Not wishing to create tom3 I tried installing xdm. There was some > problem with that so restarted gdm3 with the following result. Since the problem was in the files in your $HOME changing stuff in the system is just going to confound the issue with additional noise. Very likely your system is fine. If you were to create a pristine user again I expect you would be able to start a full desktop again. > Reinstall would certainly cure all my mistakes. Before doing that I > found xdm works but only allows me to log in as root You shouldn't be trying to log in as root. Root is ultimately powerful and X has an unaudited amount of code. Bound to be bugs in there somewhere. > and then brings up the gnome desktop with all the installed > programs. I can live with this until I find out how to correct > systemctl's problem with gdm3. I suspect it was always working but that it was something in your user desktop configuration that was the problem. Bob
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