My system was working fine until I used the synaptic package manager to install some new software. I selected a number of packages and went away. When I came back I had a plain blue screen with just the day and time at the top and white window in the centre of the screen with the host name. When I click on this it switches to display the system name and version. The only active point in the screen is the top right where I can choose to suspend, restart, shutdown. All text on this screen is a basic font.
This blue screen is not the usual gnome gui screen, it is plain blue like the windows crash screens.
It appears that the gnome gui is not being loaded.
Can anyone suggest how I can start to figure out where the startup process is falling over.
Is it possible that I selected packages for kde and that this has stuffed up the startup process.
I can boot in recovery mode and get a command line when I login as root.
Thanks

What did you install? You may have installed something that breaks other packages and, because of this, removes them. If you can use the command line type in and that may bring it all back for you.

thanks the above helped, though not fixed.
on first attempt with the above code, I got a message that there were broken packages and to run manually the command:
dpkg --configure -a
which I did.
After this I ran apt-get install gnome-core and got the message "some packages could not be installed ....
the following packages have unmet dependencies:
gnome-core : depends: empathy (>= 3.0) but it is not going to be installed.
E: Broken packages"
I rebooted and got the gnome login panel but when I logged in I got the message "gnome could not load" and I was logged out.

Any help on how I can repair my self inflicted damage would be much appreciated.
Thanks

Do you know what packages you tried to install? We really need to know what packages are causing the breakage. Empathy is part of Gnome so if it is broken something you have installed has broken it.

If you don't it may just be easier to do a clean re-install.