Ubuntu 9.10: gnome-session not starting automatically

Question

I've been running Ubuntu 9.10 for a few weeks now without a problem. I installed gloobus-preview which worked wonderfully. Today I updated my computer which also updated gloobus (which patches nautilus to provide some shortcuts). Gloobus stopped working, so I uninstalled it and tried reinstalling it. This included me uninstalling nautilus, removing the gloobus source from the sources, apt-get update, then i reinstalled nautilus. Everything seemed fine, so I reinstalled gloobus. Still had the same problems, so I re-uninstalled it and rebooted my computer. It booted up to the ubuntu login screen as normal, i signed in, then it only brought up a small white terminal screen in the top left corner. Nothing else is started (no window frames, no gnome panels... nothing but the terminal window, and the screen resolution is normal, not super small or anything). i started gnome-session manually and everything came up. Everything seems to work just fine. But I have the same problem every time I restart the computer, i have to manually start gnome-session. I've been googling to try and find a solution but I just can't find anything that helps me. Is there a way to fix this? or a way to figure out what's going on?

Thanks!

Answer 1

Finally found a solution - I just typed the following into the terminal and rebooted:

sudo apt-get install gnome-session ubuntu-desktop

All is well now.

Answer 2

In /etc/gdm/custom.conf add the following line (or edit it if it already exists):

DefaultSession=gnome-session

If already in the file it probably reads:

DefaultSession=xterm

I suppose you could establish emacs instead but I think you want some sort of session manager first.

Answer 3

Go into your Gnome session and in the terminal, open ~/.xinitrc (or create it if it isn't there already) using your editor of choice:

$gedit ~/.xinitrc

add this to it:

#!/usr/bin/env bash
exec gnome-session

make the file executable:

$chmod +x ~/.xinitrc

Let's link it to ~/.xsession so it's read by GDM on startup:

ln -s ~/.xinitrc ~/.xsession

Reboot.