recovering a broken GNOME-desktop in debian wheezy

Question

an hour ago I had a working gnome-desktop on my debian system (thinkpad x121e).

Then I installed compiz that crashed.

After a reboot the gnome-desktop no longer started.

Then I did some upgrades with aptitude, all gnome-packages seem to be there, but it is still not working.

On startup I get a login-dialog, when I login there is no desktop, only some window-manager running that allows me to start a terminal.

When I run "gnome-session" I get the error message "failed to load session "gnome".

So how do I get back to a working desktop?

I have tried "tasksel install gnome-desktop --new-install" but that just displays a progress window that after half an hour still shows 0%.

Can someone help me please?

I have tried "

Gryllida · Answer 1 · 2011-12-25 07:07:41Z

Try doing this in terminal

sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get upgrade #see if the package is held back
sudo apt-get purge gnome-session
sudo apt-get install gnome-session
startx

1 Answer