<font size="4">After upgrading between versions, I have found creating a new user, configuring that the way I like and then switching myself over to that account solves a lot of niggly problems. Working through all the crap that happens buried down in Gnome or KDE when an old set of config files is being read by the a new version of KDE or Gnome is just not worth it to me. I've also found that when using a NFS file server to serve up home directories to many people and also mixing in different distros from different client machines makes for a real headache with home directory config files. A nice solution is to have different home directories for each user/distro combination and a symbolic link to a separate directory where their working files are stored permanently.<br>
<br>So if I run Ubuntu 8.04, 10.04 and Centos 5 I would have for my user:<br><br>/home/dphurst (where my main work files exist)<br>/home/ubuntu/10.04/dphurst<br>/home/ubuntu/8.04/dphurst<br>/home/centos/5/dphurst<br><br>
each home directory works great with the distro it is designed for. A ~/data symbolic link points to /home/dphurst from each of the separate home directories so I have the same relative path into my work files for ease with scp or rsync.<br>
<br clear="all"></font><font size="4">Best wishes,<br>Dow<br>________________________________________________<br>Dow Hurst, Research Scientist<br>340 Sullivan Science Bldg., Dept. of Chem. and Biochem.<br>University of North Carolina at Greensboro<br>
PO Box 26170 Greensboro, NC 27402-6170</font><br><br><br>
<br><br><div class="gmail_quote">On Sat, Apr 23, 2011 at 10:32 PM, Richard Faulkner <span dir="ltr"><<a href="mailto:rfaulkner@34thprs.org">rfaulkner@34thprs.org</a>></span> wrote:<br><blockquote class="gmail_quote" style="margin: 0pt 0pt 0pt 0.8ex; border-left: 1px solid rgb(204, 204, 204); padding-left: 1ex;">
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If anyone is terminally bored or wants to critique my approach to solving this issue (especially anyone who wants to share a BETTER way of resolving this issue -- I'm all ears!)<br>
<br>
For the record I am not a CLI junkie (but I'd like to be one of sorts) and although I consider myself comfortable with supporting the distros that I'm familiar with; I am limited as that's more from the GUI than a CLI standpoint. Enter today's problem....<br>
<br>
<PROBLEM><br>
<br>
Last week my wife did an upgrade on her Ubuntu 9.10 box to 10.10 without knowing the potential consequences. Needless to say her Internet box was more than a little "funkified" after the procedure. As I already had good back-up for the system I opted to blast it and reinstall 9.10 (which runs really good on that machine) and make some improvements while I went. After completing that work I ran into this little wrinkle today.<br>
<br>
After starting the machine (cold boot) the desktop launched but gnome-panel crashed and never launched (no menus or icons). Having some desktop icons and a mounted external USB drive mounted at least I had some tools. Knowing that I needed a terminal window I figured I could find an internal path to that application online. (I only know these features by heart for Window$ and haven't learned them yet for GNU/Linux). The only problem was that I had no panel with Chrome on it or a Terminal launcher to get there. Knowing that Chrome saves bookmark back-ups as .HTML files I browsed to the mounted back-up drive and launched a browser process from the Chrome back-up file. Now I could access the web... Some quick digging yielded the needed command to restart the panels. Now all I needed was a way to get to Terminal. <br>
<br>
By referring to the properties of the Terminal launcher on my Fedora box I found the commands needed to create a launcher on my wife's Ubuntu desktop. Now with a desktop launcher for Terminal I could run the command "killall gnome-panel" thus killing and restarting the panels. Bingo! I'm back in business...sort of.<br>
<br>
A restart showed that the panels were still buggered-up (process died for some reason) so reflecting back on what had been done to them before the machine was shut-down; I recalled that I had added Weather Report to the top panel. I had added two (one for Atlanta and one for Wellington) and both at the time appeared to be running. Again I stop and start gnome-panel and once again it launches properly but now I can see that both Weather Reports now MIA. This leads me to suspect that they were buggered-up as well and perhaps causing (or contributing to) the failure in panels. <br>
<br>
With my limited experience in troubleshooting these issues for Linux I decided to try creating a new panel and populate it with new menus and features. (Out with the old and in with the new). After this I blew away the old panel, did a "killall gnome-panel" once again; confirmed it restarted and then rebooted to check the results. It worked and all is back to normal.<br>
<br>
</PROBLEM><br>
<br>
I know there must be a better way of doing this. The question is just "how?" All I did was use all of the tools that I know for Linux and attack the problem with what I had. Anyone care to critique? <br>
<br>
Thanks and best Easter wishes to all!<br>
<br>
<br>
Rich in Lilburn<br>
<br>
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<br></blockquote></div><br>