The importance of a back up environment

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I think its important for any ubuntu, linux user, and unix user to have a back up desktop environment.

A few days ago I had problems with gnome. Put basically it crashed. After which I couldn't login without a crash at the start of loading it. I'm guessing it might have been a problem with the previous session and gnome wasn't liking it. So what can you do in a situation like this?

Well if your like me, you know your bash, then its not the end of the world. You could try installing another desktop environment. I installed the xfce desktop package and logged into that without fault. After that gnome was able to login fine. All you have to do is start ubuntu in recovery mode or from the login screen (gdm) select a terminal login. Recovery mode is normally the 2nd option on the loader (when you start your machine a menu appears with all the operating systems.) This will start a terminal.
Once you have a prompt ready you will need to connect to the internet or network. This could be different for everyone. I have a dial script for a usb modem so I run that. When your connected you can install a chosen package.

For XFCE
sudo aptitude install xubuntu-desktop

For something smaller, fluxbox
sudo aptitude install fluxbox

Make fluxbox selectable from gdm
echo "exec startfluxbox" > ~/.xinitrc

If you wanted to you could install kde but I think its too big really for a backup desktop environment.

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