GNOME Desktop won't start (Mandriva)

I'm not really sure what happened.

All of a sudden, none of my applications wouldn't start. However, the only app I had open before I noticed this (Opera) still worked. I logged out and tried to log back in to see if that would solve the problem, and GNOME wouldn't start.

The loading window would pop-up, hang for a minute, and then crash back to the login screen.

I can still start KDE and my other desktops.

Can anyone tell me why this may have happened? And if at all possible, can somone tell me how to fix it?

Thanks.

Possibly a Gnome core library disappeared or got corrupted. I this were Gentoo, I'd do a revdep-rebuild: it's a tool that checks all programs and libraries for whether all their dependencies are resolved.

Maybe you can find a similar tool for Mandriva.

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All of a sudden, none of my applications wouldn't start.

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Don't you mean, "All of a sudden, none of my applications would start." :p
As for Gnome, I can't really help you. Have you tried starting GDM manually from the command line? Or try checking /etc/inittab to make sure it's still alright.

I'm not a gnome user but surely it has a log file lurking about.

Is your hard drive full? I've seen that happen...

It's a sign you should stop using Gnome and use KDE more often.. ;)

Nope, plenty of space left on the drive.

I've been building and installing various gnome-related libs lately (gtk+, glib, etc), in an effort to get MonoDevelop to run. It refuses to, because it appearntly can't find libgnomeui-2.so.0, even though I know that it's there (yes all the environment variables are set).

I wonder if the two (the crash, and my adventures with Mono) are related?

I'm not sure where the log file would be, but i'll check for that. And Joe, I haven't tried starting it from the command line yet, but this is because I don't know the command (sorry, i'm still a bit of a linux newb).

> don't know the command

startx

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Originally Posted by psychopath

I wonder if the two (the crash, and my adventures with Mono) are related?

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Very likely. You might have broken dynamic linking.

There are also other ways of starting display managers. ;)

First of all, you can manually start xdm, kdm, or gdm from the command line.
You can also start KDE by starting X11, and then running startk. (Depends if your path is set to your kde/bin)
Finally, you can start it from the command line the "normal" way, like Perspective said, with startx.

It starts now. I have no idea why. I didn't really do anything make it start, but i'm happy nonetheless :).

Thanks anyway all.