On Tue, Jul 28, 2020 at 07:36:06PM +0000, gajuph4...@yahoo.com wrote: > I did not install any desktop environment, print server or the standard > system utilities offered during installation.
> After successfully installing the OS, I rebooted into tty2 and installed the > packages named below: > > xorg gnome-core gnome-tweak-tool synaptic gedit gdebi file-roller > Next I rebooted the OS and there was a list of messages flashing quickly on > my screen. All of them were prefixed with [OK] with the word OK in bright > green. I assumed there were no errors. > However instead of booting into the Gnome desktop, all I got is a white > cursor blinking in the top left hand corner of my screen whose background is > black. At this point, you don't know whether the problem is down at the X/video driver/hardware level, or in GNOME. First things, first: you can boot back into console mode by going into the GRUB menu, editing the boot command and adding systemd.unit=multi-user.target as a boot parameter. See <https://docs.fedoraproject.org/en-US/Fedora/19/html/Installation_Guide/s1-grub-targets.html> for exact instructions. Once you're in console mode, you can try to diagnose the hardware and drivers and firmware, and then test X without involving GNOME or gdm3. Check your video hardware by running "lspci -nn" and looking for one or more lines that tell what your video card is. Take note of the 8-digit hexadecimal PCI ID(s) from your video devices. Write them down on paper. Use them if you need to investigate deeply. Look for missing firmware next. "dmesg | grep -i firmware" will tell you if there are any firmware files that your system wants to load, and can't. If there are missing files, write down their names, and then use a web search (either packages.debian.org or google) to find out the name of the firmware packages that contain those files. You may need to add contrib and non-free to your sources.list to get the firmware for your devices. Once firmware is installed, reboot again (still using multi-user.target), make sure xterm is installed, and then try "startx xterm". If this gives you a bare but working X session with only an xterm in the upper left corner, then congratulations -- you know X works. (Bare X uses focus-follows-mouse semantics. You'll need to move the mouse pointer *into* the xterm to be able to type in it. Type 'exit' to get out of it.) At that point, you can try "startx" by itself, which should try to run your GNOME session (unless you've installed something else as the system default x-session-manager). Or you can start gdm3, if you installed that. Or you can reboot without the multi-user.target option.
