[nmglug] a report on Brian's computer woes

Ted Pomeroy ted.pome at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 07:31:37 PDT 2018


Thanks Mark, Glad you could meet up with Brian in person. The complete
history revealed the issues and your remedy for the __dm fixed only one of
those. When things go wrong the 'backup and reinstall' routine is the
easiest way to move forward. Thanks for the excellent note here and
previous emails. Ted P.

On Mon, Mar 19, 2018 at 12:09 AM, Mark Galassi <mark at galassi.org> wrote:

>
> I met with Brian for a bit this afternoon to look at the X problem he
> had.
>
> I think the main issue is that this machine dates at least from an
> ubuntu 12.x installation.  In the course of all the upgrades and the
> superposition of window managers and underlying widget libraries the
> various config files got confused, and some binaries just plain don't
> run.
>
> I started with an immediate snapshot of essential files, then
> experimented with config files for the various desktop environments and
> display managers:
>
> rsync -av /home/loginname/ /mnt/whereImountedtheexternald
> rive/backup-home-loginname
>
> The only one I could get to invoke properly was the lxubuntu display
> manager lxdm, so I installed it, enabled it with a "sudo
> dpkg-reconfigure any_dm" and picking lxdm.
>
> That allowed us to log in properly because it did not inherit weird
> guest account setups and did not use fancy widget sets.
>
> I then recommended that it would not be time-effective to restore all
> config files (some experiments with --purge and --reinstall did not
> help).  The advice I gave was to use the backup we made and install
> 16.04 from scratch.  I left Brian with a script to pick that rsync up
> again.
>
> Lots of other weird things about the system -- it had been patched up a
> bit inorganically and possibly off-paradigm for package management, but
> the data was recoverable.  Being a 3.5gig machine it should work well
> with a new install and firefox quantum.
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