"/etc/X11/X not executable" error when startx

Question

What happened

I wanted to install KDE and Gnome along with Unity. I don't know when I installed gnome-shell on my Ubuntu 12.10, but I installed KDE minimal desktop just now using

sudo apt-get install kde-plasma-desktop

and selected lightdm as my default DM. Then I entered this to install gnome

sudo apt-get install gnome-shell

and it said I already have it installed.

So, then I restarted in normal mode and Ubuntu didn't start.

Problem

I went to recovery mode and from root shell I used

startx

it throws these bunch of errors:

/etc/X11/X is not executable
xinit: giving up
xinit: unable to connect to X server: Connection refused
xinit: server error

and when I tried

chmod +x /etc/X11/X

it says

chmod: cannot operate on dangling symlink `/etc/X11/X'

I can't use apt-get to reinstall packages, because our ISP uses portal login - and I don't know how to login from terminal (so can't connect to network). May be I can use live disk, but I don't know how to configure packages on my HD from livedisk.

I am on Windows 8 now. Any help regarding how can I get my desktop back is appreciated!

Solution 1

I am writing an answer for my question, but actually I haven't figured out exactly what happened that gave rise to those errors.

I am assuming that the whole xorg itself broke and I got my desktop back by using a live disk and chrooting (yeah - had to do that as its hard to connect to internet from terminal and its lot more easier to connect to internet from live disk and copy resolv.conf from here to there).

So, after creating a live disk and in Try Ubuntu mode, I chrooted into old partitions (I followed the guide here) and did

apt-get update && apt-get upgrade
apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg
apt-get install --reinstall gdm gnome-desktop-environment xorg

Then I changed my default display manager to gdm at /etc/X11/default-display-manager by changing this line (I think this step is not needed if after a restart your desktop is working fine, but I basically did a couple more things than said above and broke lightdm too, so I had to change to gdm!)

/usr/sbin/lightdm

to

/usr/sbin/gdm

and restarted. Well, unity is working and I got my desktop back working.

Solution 2

you have to try this

 sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg

Comments

[Bharadwaj Srigiriraju]

It says: ln: failed to create symbolic link `/etc/X11/X': File exists

[samaswin]

Try deleting the broken symlink first. rm /etc/X11/X

[Bharadwaj Srigiriraju]

deleted it and tried to startx. It says: X: cannot stat /etc/X11/X (No such file or directory), aborting.

[Sylwester]

I got this after updating HWE, then cleaning package config from ubuntu-tweak. Thus --purge removes the link because xserver-xorg was replaced with xserver-xorg-lts-<release>. I've seen this both with precise with trusty HWE and trusty with utopic HWE. doing sudo dpkg-reconfigure -phigh xserver-xorg-lts-utopic fixed it

[Fiasco Labs]

required a change on apt-get cli => apt-get install xserver-xorg --reinstall

[Déjà vu]

It's --reinstall ; great answers