Bringing old hardware back to life. About problems due to upgrading.
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Don't use this space for a list of your hardware. It only creates false hits in the search engines.
In all honesty, mörgæs, while it was frustrating at times, I also learned a lot, and I feel much more confident handling Ubuntu problems. But much of the credit belongs to BCBC and his patience and perserverance.
I appreciate your comment, and more importantly, your interest in following the progress on this thread.
...Fred
Decided to take a few days off from the rigours of Ubuntu, and had just now decided to get moving on data transfer when I ran into an unexpected problem. I had just logged in and a notice popped up telling me I was signed in as atravnic (correct) and that Ubuntu would terminate in 60 seconds (which it did). When I tried to log back in it didn't recognize my password.
Any idea what's going on? Can I change my password in recovery mode?
Ciao ...Fred
No I have no idea what is going on.
Log in to recovery mode - you'll get to a read-only recovery menu. Select option 3 (I believe) to remount drives read-write.
Then you can drop to a root shell, and enter:
Enter your new password. Enter 'exit' to return to the recovery menu, and resume normal boot. (It will be a bit weird since recovery boots with 'nomodeset' so just restart to get back to normal).Code:passwd atravnic
Once that's done you can review your logs to see if there is something that indicates what happened.
Worked like a charm. Wish evrything were as simple. Is there another way to change your password. You know, just change it, not to get a new one due to a problem.
How do I check the logs to look for what might have happened?
Did you ever get a sense which file(s) might be implicated in the problems I had. Would it save me work if, instead of data file by data file, I rolled in the entire backup and just threw out the suspects?
Thank you for your help.
...Fred
How do you set up spell checking globally?
If it were me I'd copy data... photos, music, video, documents, code, downloads. Nothing there is going to hurt. It's likely the 'config' files that will cause issues.
Of those there are a small number I'd care about. For me, it's the .ssh, .gnupg, plus a few others. Most of my browser settings are in the cloud so I don't care about that, but if you want your bookmarks etc. you'll need the .mozilla/firefox etc. None of these should cause you any issues. I'd probably just ignore the rest - if you find you need something later you know where to go back and get it.
I'm not sure what you mean about a global spellcheck.
Regarding logs, I don't know specifically what I'd look for - that problem you reported seems a bit strange. So I'd just browse through the /var/log/syslog and maybe /var/log/auth.log just to see if there is anything that stands out.
In the past when I've upgraded, there was always a spell checker running in the background, no matter what I was doing or which application I was using. I had to do nothing, It was just there. Now it's not. So what do I need to do to activate it? And that's what I meant bu global.
Thank you!
Ciao ...Fred
I tend to procrastinate when I have to do something I don't feel like doing because it's tedious work. Like restoring my backed-up data. But I fianlly did it. And of course I have questions.
I restored my desktop, well sort of. Turns out what I got was a collection of files in a folder called, surprise, desktop. What do I need to do to make it look like my original desktop.
I seem to have a similar situation regarding Firefox. I naively expected everything to roll back into all its proper positions. But clearly some additional work is needed.
I also brought back SDA1, 5 and 7. Not sure why. Because they were there I guess. Do I actually need them on my hard drive?
Finally, how/where do I turn on the universal spell checker. I do get spell checking in LibreOffice, but not anywhere else.
Thanks!
...Fred
I have no idea about a global spell checker. I'm not even sure how something like that would work actually.
If you've copied the backed-up Desktop folder to the Desktop instead of the contents, you can open up a nautilus Windows, browse to Desktop/Desktop, then select the contents and drag it to the Desktop entry (on the left under "Computer"). Then delete the empty Desktop folder afterwards. You'll still likely have to layout the icons the way you want.
SDA1, 5 and 7 - you can just copy off the data you want. Or keep them backed up in case you find you're missing something.
Firefox - from what I gather - you would rename ~/.mozilla to ~/.mozillaOLD and then copy your old .mozilla into your home directory.
e.g.
open nautilus, navigate to your home directory, hit Ctrl+H to show hidden folders. Then, exit firefox and then rename the .mozilla folder to .mozillaOLD. Then extract your old .mozilla folder into your home directory
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