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 😅
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 (likesudo apt install gnome-desktop)Anyway console (tty) is all what you have now and it should be rnough for restoring the system.
Startx just gives me a straight black screen, no cursor or nothing.
Try reinstalling the DE as someone else has suggested.
Got network issues after the reboot too, so can’t install anything atm… 😅
You clearly have borked your system. Save whatever data you still need and do a fresh install.
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.
See if you can just re-install a desktop environment. Try
sudo apt-get install --reinstall gnome(or maybecinnamon-desktop-environment, whichever you prefer). Then reboot, see if that does anything.You learned the hard way to always check what’s going to be removed when using
autoremovedidn’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.
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 😅
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
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.
This is great, I’ve been far to lazy with backup solutions. Time shift is duly noted 📝
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.
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.
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 :)
Yeah I’m thinking about getting OpenSuse Slowroll!
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
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.
I would try using it inside an archlinux distrobox, and install using
yayor some other aur helper
