The "Oh, No..." error when gdm is trying to start

On a student's Debian system, I ran some updates and resulted in gdm
refusing to start, with the error message that shows a picture of a
sad computer and a message says:

Oh no! Something has gone wrong.
A problem has occurred and the system can't recover. Please contact a
system administrator.

I'm pretty sure this is due to a failure in the video drivers--some
gnome3 packages installed and the nouveau video driver is not
sufficient. And I am certain this problem happened when I tried to
update to the network-manager from wheezy on his Squeeze-based system.
I hoped some of you might help me think though the problem so I can
fix that machine, next time it comes to the office.

These are Dell latitude computers that have the Intel Centrino
Ultimate 6300 wireless card. It has been an absolute curse. The
firmware & support programs don't work well together. On my
computer--where I've made all of these pieces work together-- there is
a diverse set of packages. The solution to the problem requires
kernel 3.4 from Debian experimental, and updating wpasupplicant and
network manager and the iwlwifi firmware from Wheezy. When I did this
to my system about 6 weeks ago, I am absolutely certain I saw the "Oh,
No..." problem. But I can't remember the fix.

This crash happens before GDM offers the list of users, so I don't
understand how it could be related to a config problem in a user
account. Right? Everybody says "check ~/.xsession-errors", but why?

When that problem happens, it IS possible to Alt-Ctl-F1 to log in on a
VT. I can get to a VT, but get the networking to start without
network manager (I'm GUI dependent, it seems).

In the olden days, I'd just remove gdm and then run "startx" from the
command line to start X11. But now, as far as I can tell, the Gnome
system pre-supposes a session-managed display manager.

Paul E. Johnson
Professor, Political Science Assoc. Director
1541 Lilac Lane, Room 504 Center for Research Methods
University of Kansas University of Kansas
http://pj.freefaculty.org http://quant.ku.edu


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