First, forgive me if this has been addressed elsewhere, but I couldn’t find it in the forum and I’d be glad to be pointed to another forum topic dealing with this.
I have an indigo iMac, PPC, 384MB RAM, on which I installed 11.1 using a net install disk and the install went well. However, when I rebooted, I was given the choice of GNOME, IceWM and another desktop I can’t recall (TWM?), and after leaving the default (GNOME) and putting in my password, I get a black screen after about 10 seconds of hang time at the login screen.
I can reboot, choose IceWM or TWM, and both those desktops come up fine.
Nothing against IceWM or TWM – I’m sure they’re great and naturally they’re getting a tryout since I can’t get to GNOME – but I’d like to get the desktop that I’m used to when using a new distro.
I’m way open to suggestions and thanks in advance.
This may be a longshot, but it sounds very much like the bug that we encountered with Ubuntu not getting past the gdm login due to a date bug and gnome when first installing:
I can reboot, choose IceWM or TWM, and both those desktops come up fine.
Great - can you fire up IceWM and get to the xterm terminal and see what the date is?
date
Don’t be surprised if xterm looks ugly at first. If you need larger fonts, just hover over xterm, CTRL-right.click at the same time, and choose “huge” fonts. Alternatively, you can call up another xterm that looks quite nice with:
Thanks, stream303 – excellent suggestion, but it didn’t work in this case. A dead PRAM battery – a notorious culprit in a lot of Mac problems – wasn’t at fault here (although I did try changing the date and time as outlined in the link just for the sake of trying).
A couple of things popped up when pushing contol-option-F1 to get a terminal prompt that I’m looking into. For example, I was prompted at one point to configure the mouse and that leads me (mistakenly, maybe?) that I should configure the monitor at the command line . . . ?
I’ll try a few more things and report back. Meanwhile, thanks again stream303, and if anyone else has any insight, feel free to jump in here.
Weird - ok at least icewm or twm window managers come up. Although it isn’t a fix, can you bring up any gnome specific programs from an xterm, such as gedit?
gedit &
perhaps just to see if anything gnome related is part of the install?