[SATLUG] Some serious help needed...

[Matthew Hunter]

On Thu, Dec 20, 2007 at 09:21:56AM -0600, Ed <etillman93 at peoplepc.com> wrote:
> Real problem:  Since the "updates," all my X-Window shells are gone. No 
> title or status bars. I can't move, resize or minimize any open windows 
> or consoles, and need to use the menu "Quit" function to terminate them. 
> And, within an application (e.g. Firefox), forms don't respond to the 
> keyboard -- e.g.: I can't type a URL/address in the address bar, or even 
> do a Google search. Everything else seems to work, after a fashion, 
> except for the gnome splash screen, which stays on after a boot, and 
> needs to be clicked off.   I'm cornfuzed...
> 
> Has anyone seen this before?  Any ideas how to fix it?

Sounds like your window manager isn't running (or is running and 
crashing).  Hard to say beyond that without more information, but 
I'd run some status checks on your package manager to see if you 
have packages in broken states.  You can probably get some 
functionality back by using a different window manager 
temporarily while you work on the problem.  FVWM is a good 
minimal option, another good option is icewm.  

My GNOME here defaults to using metacity, and that may be the 
package that's broken on your system.  Trying to run that and 
seeing what it says may be a good first debugging step.