I ran RHEL9 on VMWare and it was working fine. There was a power outage that ocurred when I was not at the machine, and after that, at bootup, I got the error message:
Oh no! Something has gone wrong. Please contact your system administrator
So I rebooted again and then edited the boot parameters to boot into multi-user mode which dropped me into a shell where I was successfully able to login to my user as well as root; so the system boots, this is probably some type of issue with the "desktop environment"/GUI.
So, first on the agenda was cat /var/log/messages and I located various times in the log where the boot process was occurring, and I noticed a few messages that stated:
org.freedesktop.systemd1 does not exist
"org.gnome.Shell.desktop" killed by signal 11
general protection fault: gnome-shell
unrecoverable failure in required component org.gnome.Shell.desktop
GdmGdmDisplay: Session never registered, failing
gdm-launch-environment[1484]: GLib-Object: g_object_unref: assertion 'G_IS_OBJECT (object)' failed
There are many other lines that seem to indicate that Gdm cannot continue, and eventually after, there is: systemd[1] Received SIGRTMIN+21 from PID 436 (plymouthd) then a bunch of messages from gdm-x-session trying to fire up, and eventually:
systemd[1]: systemd-rfkill.service: Deactivated succesfullykernel: traps: gnome-session-c[1870] general protection fault ip:... sp:... error:0 in libglapi.so.0.0.0systemd[1]: Started Process Core Dump (PID 1871/UID 0).[core dump lib details]gnome-session-binary[1857]: WARNING: Failed to upload environment to systemd: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.DBusError.NameHasNoOwner: Name "org.freedesktop.systemd" does not exist.That last error is repeated multiple times until the "general protection fault' error is displayed.
Note that also in this log are messages about coredumpctl failing later on.
Please forgive me for the somewhat truncated error messages, I had no way to copy/paste them because I am in the system TTY and manually writing them to a different machine.
I already tried uninstalling gnome-shell and reinstalling it to no avail. Additionally, I tried to reset it to its "factory" state by running the command dconf reset -f /org/gnome/ but I got the error: Cannot autolaunch D-Bus without X11 $DISPLAY.
Do you know how to fix GNOME or replace it with another temporary desktop environment. I even tried to use KDE but it's not in the repos I have access to, nor did EPEL work.
Please note that these messages may not be 100 verbatim because I am unable to copy/paste them here, and in fact the messages no longer seem to generate. This last point is very odd to me - ever since I re-installed gnome-shell, /var/log/messages no longer logs anything that occurs when I boot normally. It does, however, log when I boot into multi-user mode. So I have to go by only the older logs from normal GUI boot.