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 😅
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.
But rather crazy that one “recommend” command from debian would do this? I’m still q bit new to the Desktop world of Linux.
Which Debian guide did you follow? I’m curious what guide is causing conflicts like these.
You can reinstall Gnome with
sudo apt install gnome-desktop. If you want a better overview of what’s going on, you may want to install aptitude andsudo aptitude installthe conflicting packages.Of course, if you prefer another desktop environment (KDE, LXDE, etc.), you should install that instead of Gnome.
For when I downloaded Debian? I just went to their homepage and got the latest bookworm.
Live disk? or CD iso?
ISO and then format over to usb with Etcher 👍
What Desktop Enviroment did you install?
Try: sudo apt install tasksel && sudo tasksel
I’m a KDE kinda guy. Also for some reason not allowed to connect to WiFi anymore(via Terminal) … Been troubleshooting this for too long now. Just gonna get OpenSuse on this machine instead me thinks.
A reinstall may be a good idea, it sounds like you also removed a bunch of other components.
You may want to consider using something like timeshift in the future. That way you can roll back your OS to a previous version right from the Grub menu when you accidentally change your system in some catastrophic way. It’s a bit like System Restore in Windows, though Linux doesn’t have something as automated and comprehensive yet.
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
I’m assuming I need to reconfigure my desk opt environment too?
Unless you specified --purge, the config files should still be there. It could be that the install script will overwrite them, so if you’re worried you may want to make a backup of the relevant files in /etc before installing anything.
User config files (in the home directory) practically never get deleted by system uninstalls, so those should be fine.