Re: All settings are lost at logout
On Sunday 20 November 2016 09:41:10 70147persson@telia.com wrote:
> 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
My first reaction when I run into a weird situation like this, is to
assume that something in the path that you should own, has somehow
become owned by root, which blocks your access. Since "you" should own
EVERYTHING in your /home/you directory, the first thing I would to is to
do an empty "cd" to put you for sure at the top of your home directory.
Call up a terminal, and type:
cd
sudo chown -R yourusername:yourusername *
sudo of course will ask you for your password, and you must be in
the /etc/sudoers file in order to do that. If you are the first user
added during the install, then you're already in this priviledged state.
That won't bring back whats missing but it will make it so that stored
prefs can be stored and recovered the next time you login.
Cheers, Gene Heskett
--
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
Genes Web page <http://geneslinuxbox.net:6309/gene>
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