GUI disappeared!
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#14 GUI disappeared!
Six days ago, I decided to delete Cairo Dock which I'd installed to make my KDE Plasma look better. Unfortunately, it kept auto running on boot, even under XFCE and after I told it not to. I had to click lots of times to clear the screen of messages that no plug ins were install, then I often closed it down. I deleted a few packages which came up when I searched for Cairo, then I rebooted. I was shocked to find that I could only login using Ctrl+Alt+F4 and after that, when I typed startx I still had no GUI and initx didn't work either. It seems a file called something like xfce4 can't be found and there was some mention of a log file as well. After all that, I quickly installed Linux Mint alongside Salient OS so I could come here and ask for help.
I also wonder if forums about Arch Linux also apply to Salient OS, or which advice about Arch wouldn't apply to Salient OS.
What can I do now?
As long as you can boot into the system (ctrl+alt+f2) you can issue the following to reinstall xfce.
From your terminal/console: pacman -S xfce4
That should reinstall the base xfce system for you. I'm assuming you haven't touched anything else and that the removal of Cairo Dock is the responsible party here, although it doens't depend on xfce so having that removed is very strange.
I'm afraid that hasn't done much good! After typing the command, there's a list of numbered options. Pressing ENTER selects them all, then I get a list of error file not found messages. After that, I typed each of the options in turn. I found that option 11 doesn't work. After starting with startx I've now got a very basic xfce desktop which can't run any programs except the file manager. What can I do now?
Then i would recommend reinstalling. Whatever you have done has had a major negative impact on the installation and without knowing 'exactly' the steps that were taken to put Salient into the state it is in now would prove very difficult. If you have a seperate HOME partition you can keep that partition from within Calamares.
I've already told you that this happened just because I uninstalled Cairo Dock. There is also a log file somewhere. Please will you tell me where is is so I can find it from within Linux Mint? Also, what's the problem with option 11 of xfce4? If I have to reinstall Salient OS to fix this, then I may as well just delete it instead. Unfortunately, although I read that Salient OS was supposed to be geared towards users creating things, as well as playing games, I haven't found any software that's encouraged me to create anything and I haven't been able to install any games either. I have hardly any data under Salient OS at the moment, so I can just copy it across to my Linux Mint partition or onto a USB stick, After that, as I have hardly any data under Linux Mint either, I could just reformat the whole hard drive and start again with a blank slate. This may enable me to install a version of Mac OS, which currently stops a few seconds into the installation after detecting something it doesn't like on both my Toshiba laptops. This might be a partition "reserved for system".
It's a bit of a puzzle then since Cairo Dock shares NO dependencies with XFCE directly. I'm not sure what you mean by Option 11 of XFCE, please elaborate? If you look under the Graphics menu you will notice applications there that are creative in nature. Both Steam and Lutris are installed out of the box. Sign in to either and install your games. I don't see the issue here.
I can only offer advice where Salient is concerned. If you are trying a multi-boot scenario then I would suggest thoroughly reseraching the impact that can have on each OS you wish to install.
I'm afraid that deleting Cairo Dock has caused something vital to be deleted. The option 11 which is listed when I've tried to reinstall xfce4 is callled Terminal, as you should know. There are no graphics applications that make me feel I can create anzthing with them. Although Steam and Lutris are both pre installed, I couldnt actually install any games I ttried to intall, before the GUI stopped worrking. The situation is that as Salient OS isn't very popular and I can only get help on here instead of on a proper forum with lots of users this means that even if I reinstlled Salient OS, from scratch another problem is likely to come up which you can't solve. Due to this it's best to just stop using Salient OS, before I acumulate lots of data and settings!