[nmglug] a report on Brian's computer woes

[Brian O'Keefe]

On Mon, 19 Mar 2018 08:31:37 -0600 Ted Pomeroy <ted.pome at gmail.com>
wrote:

A great report Mark. I even understand most of it. I want to tell all
that I have never seen the speed and knowledge of command line work
that resulted in my having a different, (no thunderbird or FF but I
installed claws-mail and had an older installation of Palemoon, a
fork of FF that runs as the default browser. Don't ask why or how but
it has most of the info that I had with FF as I only switched back
months ago).
Yes, I was bad and kept distro upgrading because I installed so many
third-party apps and PPAs to get apps that really helped me in my
work, extended the system way out there as far as functionality and
so clean installs were almost never an option unless I wanted to lose
some apps. or reinstall from a list of them. In any case, my
thunderbird mail is in there somewhere and I may try evolution (I
used last over a decade ago) and see if I can import the mail. I have a
very large and complext mail folder system and I don't want to be
unable to access it. I will either "limp along" until 18.04 releases or
install 16.04 and then upgrade. Then I will have the ability to add
back my /home directory data and should be good. I can use the backup
to help determine the apps I want to get back.
So Ted, you get the giant Penguin award as you suggested backup and
reinstall and Mark you get the equally large, flightless bird award for
getting me a system that functions mostly and doing the backup and
teaching me something. I may be old but you can't make me drink!
Thanks to all-what a group
Brian

> 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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