Hi Israel,
My apologies for mislaying your original e-mail somewhere in the chaos of
parallel-but-not-equal mailer installations and a non-functional printer
installation on the failed Lu14.04 attempt.
Andre's implied rebuke is taken as deserved. I hope he will remember that
when his memory is as old as mine...
I did backup the .config and the .cache as recommended, then did the stop
and start of lightdm. Pleasingly enough, I was rewarded with a desktop
full of familiar icons. However, in due course after downloading and
installing hundreds of megabytes of updates, I wanted to reboot but there
was no apparent response. I decided then to go through the pain of making
space on my potential backup media to take the entire /home.
However I couldn't boot again, not even from the DVD, to do the transfer.
Finally Precise Puppy came to my rescue and I spent most of the weekend's
windows of opportunity juggling hundreds of gigs of files. Scrubbed the
target partition, reformatted it and did a clean install of Lu14.04.1
Which then worked rather nicely, apart from (so far):
1. Bad printer installation. The process recognised my HP DJ F4180 as
indeed an HP DJ, but had no F-series printers on its database and offered
an option which I took, with everything following smoothly until "Print a
test page?" which didn't even create an entry in the print queue. In fact
no applications see the printer, which might as well be disconnected.
Oddly enough, the parallel LXLE14.04, based on Lubuntu14.04.1 and using
exactly the same hardware, recognised the printer as an F4100-series,
installed it correctly and everything on that side works as desired. Which
is what it did with Lu12.04, come to think of it. If I manage to identify
the responsible (irresponsible?) file(s) in the Lubuntu installation,
perhaps I'll replace them, because I do actually like to use Lubuntu
although it may not always seem like it. I accept I can probably find my
way to a fix, it just annoys me on the basis of "if it works, don't tamper
with it).
2. No trace of a volume control. Even though it is the first point update
of Lubuntu14.04 and the latest updates were downloaded by update manager
this morning. What use is a sound system without a volume control?
Well, now that I have the backups safely tucked away, I'm going to do a
clean install LXLE14.04 over the major partition where I'v been trying to
install Lubuntu, to see if i can find true happiness with it as my daily
working installation. And then I'm going to install Lubu14.04.1 to the
minor partition, my "run-flat" partition, to see if I can nail these
troublesome issues. As I said, I LIKE to use Lubuntu.
Frankly, I'm depressed. If simple problems like these have evaded the
14.04 testers for so long, how ready is 14.10 going to be? Really, I would
volunteer to join the team of testers, but I'm put off by the reports that
it will be incompatible with synaptiks, which is the only reason I can
type a paragraph of text on this laptop without tearing my hair out. Are
the re[prts true? Is an alternative included in the distro?
Should I turn to plain Debian and try carving it up a bit? Suggestions
welcomw.
Best regards,
Basil
On Sat, 13 Sep 2014 14:43:06 +0200, Israel <israeld...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Basil!
I highly sugegst youtry my initial suggestion
open a tty (Ctrl+Alt+F1)
login, then:
sudo mv ~/.config ~/config_backup
sudo mv ~/.cache ~/cache_backup
then
sudo restart lightdm
or alternatively
sudo stop lightdm
sudo start lightdm
Then it should work.... however some of your application specific
settings will be gone.
you can experiment moving each folder back from config_backup to .config
Hope this does it for you.
Also you may need to move some other hidden files if you have edited
them by hand
in your home directory
On 09/13/2014 05:00 AM, Basil Fernie wrote:
Hi Israel,
No problem with the new thread, Just wasn't expecting to see my name
up in lights so soon in life...
Your suggestions were probably good, but I had this problem with 20GB
spare to hold 3 versions of a 30GB folder... I followed up the links
which were again addressing a slightly different and "easier" problem,
namely how to shift your /home partition at or after installation. My
problem is however how to "capture" an existing /home on that is
already on a different partition. But by pursuing the downlinks I
found some interesting stuff which after testing out I may be able to
summarise for some other coutios user. It did not get as far as
telling me how I could do what I wanted to do safely.
So I did some selective trimming and clipping and backed up /home to
an already full external drive and copied a carefully selected portion
to the LXLE partition so I could use Opera without extreme
contortions, hence I am able to reply to your email.
Then I tried to install Lubuntu 14.04.1 "over" the failed
installation, with preservation of /home. The installation failed in
the last 5% of "Restoring previously removed packages", i.e. right on
the last lap of the installation marathon. There was a warning that
the desktop manager was not working. The installation booted, to a
black screen with a conky. I could get a terminal window by
right-clicking on the desktop, and presumably could have replaced the
faulty or missing desktop manager with a command or two if I had a bit
more insight. I repeated the attempted installation with Lubuntu
12.04.3 and with LXLE14.04, with exactly the same results. So I am
concluding that in that /home that my greedy eyes are fixed on, is a
poisoned desktop manager which I don't want to be accessed by my
working LXLE installation on the small partition.
So my problem has changed; all the installation DVDs have good desktop
managers as evidenced by fault-free live runs, but already on the hard
drive partition in probably the /home is a vicious evil desktop
manager. How can I destroy this dragon that guards Sinbad's cave full
of software jewels and my precious archival data?
Best regards,
Basil
On Thu, 11 Sep 2014 00:06:17 +0200, Israel <israeld...@gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Basil,
I wanted to move this to a new thread, so it would be easier to spot in
people's inbox :)
OS/2 eh? I remember using that for a while. Unfortunately that was
during the time of MS' big move to control the market. And well, they
did. They are still trying to, however the advent of the smartphone
has
seriously jeopardized their chances.... much like Netscape Navigator
did
with IE taking over the internet (and Firefox does still against MS and
Google taking over the free web)
Regarding moving your home to a separate partition in a 'working'
install:
The potential for data loss is very real in this case. No matter what
you decide to do, you should BACKUP your home partition to whatever
media you have (USB/SD/external HD, etc...)
This is something we should all be doing fairly periodically either
way.
So, here is some reading material for you.
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Partitioning/Home/Moving
This seems fairly straight forward.
But, if it were me, I would simply backup my /home and reinstall.
See this for some info:
https://help.ubuntu.com/community/DiskSpace#Separate_.2BAC8-home_.28optional.29
and here is one with screenshots (albeit older, but still relevant)
http://www.psychocats.net/ubuntu/installseparatehome
The main consideration is that you will have to use the "Do something
else" option if you choose to reinstall from a disk ever again, and set
it up the same.
something like:
17Gig partition mounted at /
32 Gig mounted at /home
1 Gig swap partition
You can of course try the first method, and if it does not succeed you
have a backup of your home anyway, and can simply reinstall.
But don't share your home partition with other distros... there are
lots
of issues that could creep up that way, unfortunately, especially using
your ~/.config directory
Your ~/.config directory is the one that holds the configuration files,
and may be the culprit of your current mess, though it might simply be
a
mess of incomplete things installed.
hope this info helps your restoration process
--
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