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Tuesday, May 26, 2020

Zoom On Linux Mint 17.3 Trashed My GUI Desktop On Bootup -- Technical Post Please Ignore

I had to do a Zoom meeting so I installed it through the browser on my Linux Mint 17.3 installation.  It failed to accept the password and so it didn't work anyway.  But then when I restarted the box, it booted me to the terminal!  No desktop, no GUI, no KDE.

I got a text box with message, "MDM: Xserver not found: /usr/bin/X :0 -audit 0 -auth /var/lib/mdm/ :0.X " and it asked if I wanted to see the message returned so I said, "Yes."

The message was, "MDM: Xserver not found...."

I ran an update from command line: sudo apt-gt install update.

I backed up current xorg.conf file in /etc/x11/xorg.conf to xorg.old.conf

Then I did:  sudo dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg ...it returned, "xserver-xorg not installed" ...which was disturbing, but then I decided I will have to reinstall it, so I did:

sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver.xorg

That seemed to go well and I restarted the box and I got the desktop back, it was back to the normal boot.

Other things that I tried that may or may not have helped in the process:

sudo Xorg-configure which created xorg.conf.new in /home/john, then I copied it to /etc/x11/xorg.conf, ran startx but got /usr/bin/X: not found.

I also did:
sudo apt-get --purge remove zoom ...and got 138MB disk space will be freed...
 Upon restart, after that, I got the same issue, which was booting up to tty with message "failed to start x server ...would you like to view xserver output to diagnose?"  No/Yes

I ran update to reinstall MDM  ...got back, "already newest version."

The instructions that helped me here came from:
askubuntu.com/questions/21309/how-to-restore-xserver and
forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=235153 and
forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?t=174357 and
askubuntu.com/questions/237973/boots-up-in-terminal-and-startx-cant-be-found and
forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.php?f=46&t=105156&sid=283aa6635f639a4a62631b287b644b78&start=20  <-- title on this if this long url doesn't work is, "<SOLVED> Failed to Start the X server" on the linux mint forums....

Needless to say I won't be reinstalling any of that zoom crap on my main production Linux installation machine!

Hope this helps, hope you don't need it.... - J
My Desktop is back!


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