[NCLUG] debian on pms

[Person Who Asked To Have Her Name Removed From The Internet]

hi!

now I can log into debian, but
I cannot do much.
After the Welcome to Gnome screen, 
i get a blank background
The buttons all work, but if i select 
a shell such as bash or tcsh, 
it never appears.
There's no icons at the bottom
or anything of much use.
Some of the menu items 'work' in the
sense that a little dialog box comes
up, but again, no graphical application
will appear on the screen.
I switched to xsession and got the
xterm attached to my mouse, but as 
soon as I click it to put it somewhere,
it then disappears.

This has to be a result from my playing
with cfdisk adding another partition.
It is related to /etc/passwd and /etc/shadow, which is set
as  rw_ r_ _ _ _ _ with root root uid/grp
which is what it's supposed to be, eh?
and shadow is:


error message in /home/sugar on .gnome_error_r
GLib-WARNING **: getpwuid_r(): failed due to : Permission denied.

in /etc i keep getting funny crap like
shadow.lock
passwd.lock
passwd-
shadow-
.pwd.lock

whether i'm loggin in or trying to add another user i.e.
useradd .....

help, 
thanks
-me

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- Person Who Asked To Have Her Name Removed From The Internet 
- preserver of butterflies, admirer of trees, conquerer of challenges

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