All settings are lost at logout
After a journey in GNU/Linux for some years via Suse, Ubuntu and Linux
Mint for Debian (LMDE) I finally decided to take the step into the
master himself, Debian. So I downloaded the live ISO file and started
the install process of Debian 8.6 with Mate and Marco window manager
from a usb memory stick on my H-P laptop. The first try went quite well
and the system came up running.
But I made some mistakes when installing some programs, so I started it
over in a clean reinstall. All partitions except the /home partition
were reused but formatted. Also this time the "virgin" system was
working well, and I started the job with installing all the applications
I wanted.
First, however, I installed the nVidia video driver, as I have never got
Nouveau work as I want. I have an external screen connected via hdmi and
that one has never got any image from Nouveau. Well this is another
question, and despite quite a lot of effort to solve that, I have
resigned and accept using nVidia which works quite well.
Next thing to do before the application install process, was to remove
the PulseAudio, which does note work very good together with some of the
applications I want.
So finally the turn had come to the real adaptation work. First I
installed some music writing programs: LilyPond and Denemo, Ardour3 and
Jack. Next came Mozilla Thunderbird. And so it went on with, the GNU
Emacs and a few other programs, all of which I have been using for many
years without any problems.
At this this stage 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
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