Gnome has disappeared!

[John Lagrue]

Scot L. Harris wrote:

>On Tue, 2004-08-24 at 09:32, John Lagrue wrote:
>  
>
>>On booting up my system this morning and logging in I found myself 
>>running twm!
>>
>>Investigation shows that Xclients-default no longer exists, and that 
>>gnome has seemingly vanished; certainly running 'switchdesk gnome' 
>>reports that gnome is not installed.
>>
>>Does anyone have any idea of what could have caused this? And what I can 
>>do to repair it?
>>
>>JDL
>>    
>>
>
>Did you check your RPM database to see if the gnome packages are still
>listed there?
>  
>
A lot were, yes.

>As to what could have happened, you may have deleted some portion of
>your file system by accident, you may have removed the gnome packages
>using rpm or yum, one of your file systems may not have mounted
>correctly, cosmic rays blasted your hard drive erasing specific files,
>your system was hacked and modified by someone else just for fun, UFOs
>may have replaced your system with almost an exact duplicate except for
>the gnome packages (they prefer KDE).  
>
>  
>
It was the aliens, damn them!

>As to what you can do to repair it, if you find the packages are no
>longer on your system then re-install the packages.  However you may
>want to spend some time looking through roots shell history and the
>various log files to try to figure out what caused the problem in the
>first place.
>
>You may also want to provide some info as to what version of the OS you
>are using and basic info on the hardware just in case someone else has
>the same equipment and has seen this problem.
>
>Also think back to what you did just before you did nothing to the
>system.  That usually is the source of problems like this.
>
>:)
>
>
>  
>
Believe me I tried to remember; and the only answer that I can come up 
with is that I installed yumi. It seemed to work well, and when I last 
closed down the system it was from a running gnome desktop.

I solved (or rather, recovered) the system by logging into a failsafe 
terminal and running 'yum install gnome*'

Thanks for the pointers. I will keep an eye out for those aliens *grin*

JDL