gnome-fallback and subsequent issues

I am running 12.1 on Acer 5536, an AMD Athlon X2 64 bit machine with ATI Radeon HD 3200 graphics card.

A couple of weeks back the network manager quick-start button from the top right corner of the desktop became invisible. The machine would still connect to the router without any issues. Last week, I tried to connect it to a different wifi network and it did not. Finally, I had to force it to do that as a superuser through Yast. I tried to restore the network manager on the desktop using Panel. However, Panel would not open. It was then that I decided, like a fool, to reinstall Panel. Using Yast, I unchecked the Panel in the repositories and clicked on update. The system (clearly smarter than me), asked me to reconfirm the action. I did that without thinking much.

The proverbial crock of excreta hit6 the fan when I tried to reboot. It would give me a message reading ‘failed to load session “gnome-fallback”’. That dialog box would offer me only one option - LOG OUT. Then, I re-logged in as Failsafe. It gave me a console. Using the console, I reinstalled Panel. After this, when I tried to restart normally, I had the same problem.

I do not mind doing a complete new install. However, I have nearly 100 GB of wildlife photos on the hard disk. I cannot afford to lose them. In order to recover them, I created a live USB and booted with it. With that, I was able to recover most of the files to an external hard drive. However, a few very important folders (who are actually back-ups from an older machine themselves) have become inaccessible. I mean, each such folder has that tiny X mark at the bottom right hand corner of the folder icon. The system does not allow me to open the folder. I am ****-scared to do a fresh install as I have experienced long ago in Ubuntu, data created by earler installations becomes virtually inaccessible.

Could some of you good samaritans help me out of this? I need to either be able to do a regular boot (without the gnome fallback loop) or be able to take a back up of all those folders that have turned upon me.

To recap, I cannot open the gnome desktop. I have access only to the ‘Asparagus’ console - if I have to boot from the had-disk. Else, I can boot from a live cd but it blocks access tio some of the older (and important) folders.

In case this query needs to be moved to a different location, do please bung a brick at me and I shall attend to it immediately.

Thanks

I am not a Gnome user, thus I will leave it to others to work on that. But I see you worry about your user data. As long as you followed the sensible default of having a seperate partition for* /home*, there is nothing to worry. On an install you only have to be sure that this partition is** not formatted.** Just tell the installer to mount it in the new system on /home. And everything will be there after installation.

EDIT: and of course you do not backup those files/directories, you can not get into with a GUI as end-user. use a terminal (or better the console) as root and copy them over.

Well … Gnome login endless loop could have different causes. First you should not enable autologin, because if it fails, it will just keep failing. You might create another user and see if it has the same problem. It will tell you if it’s a Gnome configuration problem. If it’s the case, you might be able to solve the problem by deleting the file ~/.config/dconf/user. Be aware that if you do so, all your Gnome preferences will be gone - but I guess you don’t care at this point.

As said by Henk, reinstalling won’t touch your data if you have a separate /home partition and you don’t format it during setup*. It’s not impossible that your Radeon HD 3200 will only work in gnome-fallback with the open source driver which gets installed by default - I don’t remember. Unfortunately this model or ATI card is NOT supported anymore by the latest ATI proprietary driver (Catalyst). I recommend using atiupgrade (5.0) to install either version 12.4 of the driver (the last version that supports your graphics card) or the new legacy 12.6 beta driver. For more details, see this post http://forums.opensuse.org/english/other-forums/development/programming-scripting/449058-upgrading-ati-driver-atiupgrade-18.html#post2473397 and look at the first screenshot (I actually have the same graphics card).

  • it doesn’t mean that you should not back up your data!

On 2012-07-12 19:56, tsagar wrote:
>
> I am running 12.1 on Acer 5536, an AMD Athlon X2 64 bit machine with ATI
> Radeon HD 3200 graphics card.
>
> A couple of weeks back the network manager quick-start button from the
> top right corner of the desktop became invisible. The machine would
> still connect to the router without any issues. Last week, I tried to
> connect it to a different wifi network and it did not. Finally, I had to
> force it to do that as a superuser through Yast. I tried to restore the
> network manager on the desktop using Panel. However, Panel would not
> open. It was then that I decided, like a fool, to reinstall Panel. Using
> Yast, I unchecked the Panel in the repositories and clicked on update.
> The system (clearly smarter than me), asked me to reconfirm the action.
> I did that without thinking much.

Contrary to Windows, in Linux a reinstall does not work.

> Could some of you good samaritans help me out of this? I need to either
> be able to do a regular boot (without the gnome fallback loop) or be
> able to take a back up of all those folders that have turned upon me.
>
> To recap, I cannot open the gnome desktop. I have access only to the
> ‘Asparagus’ console - if I have to boot from the had-disk. Else, I can
> boot from a live cd but it blocks access tio some of the older (and
> important) folders.

Get to that console, fire up yast, create a new user, and log as that user.
See if things work there.

You can also install another desktop (from yast). I suggest XFCE, because
it is similar to the old gnome. See if you can access your files there.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)

Henk / PTA / Carlos,

Thanks for your suggestions. I finally managed to copy all the files to an external hard disk. I was facing difficulties on mounting the external hard disk since it was encrypted. However, I found a tutorial here to mount the external drive. Once that was done, it was very easy (time consuming though) to copy all the files. Now, I shall simply reload the OS and restore all the files.

Here, I feel, Suse should incorporate a proper safety mechanism. When I removed Panel through Yast, I got a simple warning requesting confirmation. Instead, if it had given a sterner warning, it would have been better. Anyway, I have learnt something new. That is a clear positive. We live and we learn! :).

Thanks again for all the support.

Regards

PS I guess, this thread can be closed as ‘Solved’ - at least partially.

On 2012-07-13 15:46, tsagar wrote:

> Here, I feel, Suse should incorporate a proper safety mechanism. When I
> removed Panel through Yast, I got a simple warning requesting
> confirmation. Instead, if it had given a sterner warning, it would have
> been better.

Yes, but that can not be done. There are many crucial packages in the
system, there are many things that you can do as administrator that can
break a system. Linux is designed that way, it assumes you know things.

> PS I guess, this thread can be closed as ‘Solved’ - at least partially.

That’s not usually done in these forums.


Cheers / Saludos,

Carlos E. R.
(from 11.4 x86_64 “Celadon” at Telcontar)