Hoary cant start X (gdm, I guess)

[Kevin O'Gorman]

I've got an installation at school that I upgraded to Hoary just before
the school year ended.  I'm not sure, but I think I did an upgrade of
everything just before I left.  I may well have left while the upgrade was
still going on.

I got back to that machine for the first time today, and found that
a power failure had caused a reboot, but the system can't start
Gnome any more.  It wouldn't start gdm, or kde, or startx -- each one
failed in a different way.

Now I can't run synaptic, of course, and I have never familiarized
myself with command-line tools for managing the packages.  Can
some kind soul give me pointers to things to RTFM?  Or maybe a
few steps that will help diagnose the problem?

I can log into the machine remotely, and I have root access, but I'll
only rarely be there physically -- this Tuesday plus any Sunday when
I really need to.  So this is a bit tricky.

Thanks...

++ kevin

-- 
Kevin O'Gorman, PhD