Boots up in terminal and startx can't be found
Solution 1
For the rest people will end up on this thread
I installed Eclipse for Android development but messed up with my x too
sudo apt-get install xorg
worked for me.
I startx
without restart and ended up in a desktop (Unity) without bars and Dash and stuff. Only the desktop (wallpaper) and the startup apps running like Gwibber.
Then I Ctrl+Alt+T for terminal and did `sudo apt-get install nvidia-current (I have Nvidia GPU) and then restarted. Now Lightdm and Unity working correctly.
How it helps
Solution 2
I see you reinstalled anyway, but if you actually ran what you said you ran, then this is the explanation for why your system broke.
To reinstall eclipse, purging all config, you could use:
sudo apt-get --purge remove eclipse
sudo apt-get install eclipse
To just reinstall eclipse, you could use:
sudo apt-get install --reinstall eclipse
You said you used:
sudo apt-get --purge remove [Ecplise]
Note the capitalization and spelling. But, much more significantly, note the square brackets. This does something very different to what you were expecting. I suggest you read up on regex.
The apt-* commands all take arguments in the form of regex strings; however, different apt-* commands handle them differently. apt-cache
search searches both name and description fields, whilst apt-get
searches just the name field. apt-cache
disregards case, whilst apt-get
respects it, etc. It's all relatively intuitive behaviour, so you don't need to think about it most of the time.
Here's some examples of the behaviour of apt-get
. Note how regex can be used. I advise against testing these yourself, so I have added the -s flag - this runs a simulation, as opposed to actually changing your system.
sudo apt-get install -s anyedit
This matches all packages called "anyedit" precisely - there aren't any.
sudo apt-get install -s anyedit.*
This matches all packages with "anyedit" anywhere in the name - this is going to find "eclipse-anyedit".
sudo apt-get install -s ^anyedit.*
This matches all packages where the name starts with "anyedit" - there aren't any.
sudo apt-get install -s [a-z]edit.*
This is starting to get bad. Now we're matching all packages where the name contains the text "edit" directly preceeded by any lowercase alphabetical character - it it would match "gedit", "kcoloredit", "gedit-latex-plugin", "ckeditor", etc.
sudo apt-get install -s [abc]
[abc] matches either a, or b, or c. This will find every package which contains any of those characters in its name. So it will install most of the packages in the repositories.
sudo apt-get remove --purge -s [Ecplise]
This matches every package which contains one of c,e,i,l,p,s or E in its name. This regex matches over 98% of the packages in the repositories, and unfortunately your command has requested they all be fully deleted along with their configuration. Now you can hopefully understand what happened.
Reading package lists... Done
Building dependency tree
Reading state information... Done
Note, selecting 'libc6-xen' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'omninotify' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'mpg123-alsa' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'libuuidm-ocaml-dev' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'libtexttools-doc' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'libsvm-java' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'libstdc++-dev-armel-cross' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'libosmgpsmap2' for regex '[Ecplise]'
Note, selecting 'libolap4j-java' for regex '[Ecplise]'
... etc (it's a long list consisting of most of the packages on your system, including xserver-xorg, which contains /usr/bin/X).
So, the moral of the story is: be aware that apt-* commands accept regular expressions, always double-check your commands before running them, and with apt-get, always double-check what it's telling you it's actually going to do you before you press 'y' to proceed!
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ubuntuNoob
Updated on September 18, 2022Comments
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ubuntuNoob over 1 year
ubuntu 12.04 newest kernel 3.7.1
Ok, I downloaded "Eclipse" in order to do some programming. then I wanted to reinstall it so i "
sudo apt-get --purge remove [Ecplise]
".Then I restarted my computer (asus ux31a) and it loads the nice purple startup screen and then goes straight to the command -line and asks for login and password.
I tried for about an hour to mess around with it based off of other similar problems people had.
I tried...
ctrl-f7(f8)
-- nothing
startx --
and got the erroretc/x11/xinit/xserverrc: 3: exec: usr/bin/x: not found
then when I try to sudo shutdown now I get could not write bytes: broken pipe
I'm trying to trouble shoot this I could just reinstall Ubuntu but i'd rather fix the error if possible.
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Luis Alvarado over 11 yearsJust assuming that 12.04 + Kernel version 3.7.x is working correctly. Did you try sudo apt-get install xserver-xorg or sudo apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg to make sure the xserver is installed correctly?
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user1151080 over 6 yearsWow, I did not know the apt-get parameters were regular expressions. Great answer!