Re: All settings are lost at logout

[Kaj]

Den 2016-11-22 00:46, skrev Lisi Reisz:
On Monday 21 November 2016 23:34:06 Kaj wrote:
Den 2016-11-21 17:18, skrev Kent West:
On Mon, Nov 21, 2016 at 9:39 AM, Kaj <70147pers...@telia.com
<mailto:70147pers...@telia.com>> wrote:
    Den 2016-11-21 15:53, skrev Kent West:
    > On Sun, Nov 20, 2016 at 8:41 AM, <70147pers...@telia.com >
    > <mailto:70147pers...@telia.com>

    <mailto:70147pers...@telia.com> <mailto:70147pers...@telia.com>>
    wrote: > > > A[fter a reinstall of Debian] all looked very fine, and
    I decided to > restart the computer. The first observation was that
    suddenly all the > devices defined and mounted in /etc/fstab
    appeared as icons on the > desktop, and I could not remove them.
    Next was that all of my > settings of Caja file manager were gone. I
    use to make some personal > adaptation: first I prefer one mouse
    click to open a file from the > icon, the list view instead of icon
    view and a few other options like > these. Until now all of these
    settings has been saved and restored at > every login, but now they
    are lost and has to be redone every time. > The same deals with the
    wi-fi password, I have to write it in at > every login. > > Next
    observation is that I can  add no program starters to the panel. >
    Well, yes, I can add one starter, but no more, they do not appear >
    there. I can remove the first icon, and add another one, but still >
    just one. Creating them, even more than one, on the desktop causes
    no > problem. If all these effects come from the same source I do
    not > know, but I suspect they do. Some package might have
    unintentionally > been removed, but if so I have not been able to
    find out which one. I > have made reinstalls of al lot of them, e.g.
    mate-panel, but without > any result. Could anyone find the common
    factor, I would appreciate > it. If nothing else I will of course
    make a new reinstall, but it > takes a good deal of time, and I feel
    it ought to be unnecessary. > > Regards Kaj > > > My first guess is
    that when you didn't wipe your /home partition, you > preserved your
    old home directory, and then logged in after the > reinstall with
    the same name but different user ID, which means not > all of that
    directory belongs to you. > > I'd log out, switch to a VT
    (Ctrl-Alt-F2), log in as root, rename > your user directory (mv
    /home/kaj /home/kaj.bak), delete your current > user (deluser kaj),
    and then recreate your user (adduser kaj), so > that you have a
    fresh user directory. > > This is only one of two or three ideas
    that come immediately to mind > as a way to deal with / test my
    theory that your user directory > doesn't have the correct perms,
    but they all boil down to suspecting > your user directory perms,
    and fixing them. > > I doubt very seriously that a reinstall is
    needed. > > -- Kent > > > > > -- Kent West
    <")))>< Westing Peacefully - > http://kentwest.blogspot.com

    Hi Kent. Thank you for your answer.

    A wee of your thoughts I have had myself. Among others I have
    earlier noticed that all these hidden config files residing in the
    home directory can give very confusing results when you install a
    previously used program in a new environment. So I tested to move
    all these hidden directories, all starting with a dot, into a
    specially created directory, in order to being able to put personal
    settings back when the problem is solved.  When running the
    different programs, you can see how they create new hidden
    directories to put their config files in.

    So this I have tested without success. Next I have created a new
    user (test) with an own, new home directory. No success on that
    neither.

    So I think that I have tested the essential parts in your
    suggestion, even if I have not been that drastic to clean my home
    directory completely.

    One reason for my suspicion of a mistakenly removed program is that
    the removal of PulseAudio also took away of a lot of other programs,
    e.g. Gimp. Those I have had to lay back manually afterwards. Despite
    a lot of searching however, I have not found which program or
    service is lacking.

    /Kaj


I'd next try a different desktop environment ("sudo tasksel" might do
the job easily). If that works, you'll have a good indication that it
has something to do with MATE/Marco/Caja.


--
Kent West                    <")))><
Westing Peacefully - http://kentwest.blogspot.com

Thank you Kent for the hints on how to solve my problem. Well now I have
stepped out on unknown ground. I had never had any reason to use this
program tasksel, and hence knew nothing about it. But well, after
reading the man page, I gave it a try, and installed the LXDE
environment. After reboot I found that most of, maybe every, program I
had installed in Mate is here too. Maybe not so strange, but a welcome
observation. So far I have not tested all these, so I do not know if
they also behave the same as in the old environment, but I assume they
will. At least Thunderbird is the same, as far as I can see now.

Another observation is that all the icons of devices mounted via
/etc/fstab is not on this desktop, so that is an advancement.

However, the settings in Caja did not survive the logout and reboot.
They have to be defined once again.

But did they survive after you re-entered them in LXDE and rebooted?

Lisi

No, they didn't. I defined them in Caja (single click etc.), did a 
reboot and checked them when the system was up again, but all settings 
were back to the default state: double click, icon view etc. /Kaj

So half a step forward, but we are not at the goal yet.

But thank you so far,

Kaj