twm instead Gnome after installing ATI proprietary

[ametrin]

Hi. I was trying to use step by step this wiki guide http://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary and no problem appeared.
But after reboot my machine, I got a just terminal with login. So I ran startx and got twm.
my xorg.conf has same lines like wiki tut. I tried reinstall gnome with apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg but no change.

Could you please give me some hints where to start to solve this issue?
Im new to this stuff.

[lolanoob]

Hi. I was trying to use step by step this wiki guide http://wiki.debian.org/ATIProprietary and no problem appeared.
But after reboot my machine, I got a just terminal with login. So I ran startx and got twm.
my xorg.conf has same lines like wiki tut. I tried reinstall gnome with apt-get install --reinstall xserver-xorg but no change.

Could you please give me some hints where to start to solve this issue?
Im new to this stuff.

Is it booting to GDM?

[ametrin]

Thanks for response
from /etc/init.d/gdm start I got just new prompt line.

/edit: so, dont know what eaxactly happen but I 'solved' it with: apt-get install gnome, apt-get install gdm, dpkg-reconfigure xserver-xorg
Where my gnome dissapeared lol? And whats best, I have: direct rendering: yes.

[Ex-Expat]

I had a similar problem. I installed Debian KDE 5.0.2 on 2 different machines and got TWM instead of KDE. Even quitting TWM and doing startx just launches TWM again. Oddly, shutdown shows "stopping kdm" as if KDE was working. Had to ""apt-get install xorg kdm kde-core" before I could even get KDE as a window manager option. After that it works fine but makes me wonder what the problem is. The ISO passes the md5sum check. The Debian KDE 5.0 disc from a couple of months ago installed KDE just fine. Perhaps there's a problem with the 5.0.2 ISO's? I built the 5.0.2 ISO with jigdo from the 5.0 ISO, if that matters.

Machine 1:
PIII 733 desktop system
ATI Technologies Inc 3D Rage Pro AGP 1X/2X (rev 5c) video

"Machine" 2
VirtualBox virtual machine on laptop - Fujitsu Lifebook S7020D with Intel Mobile 915GM Express (rev 03) video

[dbbolton]

To the OP, my guess is that you removed a dependency of the gnome metapackage, upgraded apt without paying attenion, so all the other dependencies of gnome were also removed.

startx will automatically launch the default xsession (usually twm, default in Debian and FreeBSD AFAIK) unless something else is specified in the user's .xsession or .xinitrc file.

You can make sure your display manager is starting in your default runlevel using sysv-rc-conf.