Thanks to all who helped me.
I have gotten XFCE4 running again and the item "Log Out" has returned to
the bottom of the applications menu where it had been prior to upgrading
to Trixie and clicking it brings up the popup which contains 4 choices
now instead of 6. It now has "Log Out" "Restart" "Shut Down" and
"Suspend". It previously also had "Hibernate" and one other which I did
not use and cannot now remember. At least "Shut Down" works, I haven't
tried the other 3. I did nothing to make it reappear and can't explain
why it was missing. but when XFCE4 finally loaded, there it was.
To make Xfce4 work again, I read all sorts of stuff which DuckDuckGo
brought me, none of which seemed to help though they did change some of
the error messages.
What finally seems to have made it work again was that there were 2
compiler packages which were installed from the devel section. One is
named gdc. It says it's a D compiler which I've never heard of. The
other was, I believe a C++ compiler, but I've forgotten exactly what it
was. Both of the claimed to be updatable but I could not update them.
They were version 4:14.2.0-1 and it said they were upgradable to
4:14.2.0-1cross. I could neither update them nor uninstall them as they
were dependencies of something else and each time I marked them to be
uninstalled it would want to uninstall other things so I backed out. I
put the on hold for a while but eventually I uninstalled all the various
display managers that I had installed then I was able to uninstall the
compilers. Then I reinstalled lightdm and it worked.
There now still one package installed that I can neither update nor
uninstall.
It is in the Optional interpreters section. It is called:
cpp-14-x86-6 GNU C preprocessor for x86_64-linux-gnu
It's supposed to be updatable from 14.2.0-19 to 14.2.0-19cross which
appears
to be not available, but when I mark it to be uninstalled, it wants to also
uninstall these 7 packages.
**- Opt devel cpp-x86-64-l GNU C preprocessor (cpp) for the amd64
architecture
**- Opt interpre cpp-14 GNU C preprocessor
**- Opt interpre cpp GNU C preprocessor (cpp)
**- Opt x11 x11-xserver- X server utilities
**- Opt x11 xorg X.Org X Window System
**- Opt xfce xfce4-sessio Xfce4 Session Manager
**- Opt xfce xfce4 Meta-package for the Xfce Lightweight
Desktop Environment
This is using dselect by the way. I don't know if anyone else still
uses it or not.
I'd appreciate any insight into what the problem may be.
Thanks again for the help.
On 11/3/26 10:26 PM, Donald MacDougall wrote:
Nov 3, 2026 5:01:33 PM Greg Wooledge <[email protected]>:
>
> On Tue, Nov 03, 2026 at 16:45:40 -0800, Donald MacDougall wrote:
>> xterm was already installed so running "startx xterm" does exactly as
you described.
>
> Well, that's good news. That means your X server, kernel, and video
> driver are all at least in good enough shape to run a basic X server
> without any fancy crap going on.
>
> This means that whatever the problem is, it's either at the application
> level (XFCE and company), or it's some sort of driver issue that only
> happens when an application tries to do something fancy.
It has happened to me twice now after doing upgrades. Once on a very
old desk top upgrading from Buster to Bullseye as I recall, and now on
a much newer laptop after going from Bookworm to Trixie. I'd like to
think that a driver issue is probably remote.
>
> After this point, unfortunately it may get a lot harder to get
additional
> clues. I'm hoping someone who knows XFCE, or video driver issues in
> general, can help out.
>
I mentioned to someone a little earlier that maybe I should uninstall
XFCE and see what happens. I ran X11 for a long time without any DE
and installed XFCE much later. I've forgotten what I used for a
window manager and a desktop back then. There were a lot of choices
and I suppose some of them still exist but it's hard for me to
remember now. I don't want to do it if I'm going to dig myself deeper
into the hole I'm already in.
Don
