startx displays black screen (but a working mouse) after messing with llvm installations

Question

I installed llvm4.0 in order to get a Python package working. Once I had that going, I uninstalled older versions of llvm. Now, this seems to have caused problems with the desktop.

Upon boot, I see a graphical login prompt (splash?) which works. After this, I get a black screen with a working mouse, and it doesn't seem to load the desktop.

So far I have tried: dist-upgrade, dpkg --configure -a, reinstalled llvm3.4 and 3.8, installed libegl1-mesa. I had an error about a missing dri_i985.so (not sure this is the exact name) in the Xorg log, but I think I fixed that.

A seemingly related issue is that, after going to the command line with ctrl+alt+F1, when I try returning to a graphics environment with ctrl+alt+f7, it seems to be hanged at "Restoring resolver state...". It was suggested elsewhere to add "acpi=force" to the grub config file, but this did not work either.

What are the relevant log files I should be looking at? There are no errors showing in /var/log/Xorg.0.log

Answer 1

Okay, so I've fixed my own problem, I think all I had to do is reinstall mdm (mint desktop manager).

What I did is install gnome (sudo apt-get install gdm), and then apt-get install gnome-core. This desktop worked fine.

So then I went back and just installed mdm, and now we're all good... It's a simple fix but took a while to figure out that this is what I needed to do.