gnome-shell won't start

[Joe Zeff]

On 02/04/2014 03:55 AM, Stephen Berg (Contractor) wrote:
> I get a black screen with a mouse cursor.  Nothing else happens after
> that besides a little drive activity for a minute or so and even that
> goes away.

I use Xfce.  Recently, on my desktop only (F19) it's been doing 
something odd: if I've been away long enough that xscreensaver has 
blanked the screen, the monitor's LED will show that it's active, but 
the screen is still blank, although sometimes it will come back properly 
for less than a second, then blank again.  I've found that if I use 
^Alt-F2, I'll get a text console with a login prompt; if I go right back 
with ^Alt-F1, the screen's back to normal.  I mention this only because 
you might try the same trick because the worst thing that can happen is 
it doesn't do any good for you.