Desk top missing

[Bart Silverstrim]

Leonard Chatagnier wrote:

> Thanks for the added info, Bart. It is reassuring. I
> presume that when I get to the new user stage and the
> old files/folders are not on the desktop(kde 4.1) then
> it is no point in continuing.  Correct?  Say the new
> user desktop has all I wanted, I would just copy from
> old user home the files I wanted to keep for
> configuration, etc. as one way of getting the desired
> results. Then I could just chown -R olduser if I had
> to have it?

I think I know what you're saying...

If you log in as the new user and the missing files are recreated (the 
defaults), to get any additional files you used to have, you would do 
the sudo chown -R newuser:newuser ~/oldhome (which changes the owner of 
the files...) and move them from ~/oldhome/Desktop to ~/Desktop.

Chown changes the owner from your old user to the new user. You must use 
sudo because sudo gives administrator power...you can't, as newuser, 
arbitrarily change ownership of files you don't own (marked as olduser).

Once you own them you can copy or move to them to other locations in 
newuser's folder structure, like ~/Desktop, and they should reappear.

Since you copied the data over in the first place (with "sudo cp -R 
/home/olduser ~/oldhome") it means you're working with data in your new 
user's directory, not the old user, so you're sandboxed...play all you 
want, you can still log off and log back in as your "broken" old login.

>  OTOH, is there anything I can do to also
> fix the old home to get the desktop back?  

Depends on what happened to it. Was it corrupted from a crash? You may 
not be able to in that case. Or it may be something so fubarred that you 
may be able to fix it, but the time invested will frustrate you to the 
point of pulling hair out before this other "fix" would work.

I honestly don't know...it's possible that you could boot to a recovery 
console and try fsck to fix the filesystem (you might want to consider 
having it checked anyway in case there's a problem with the filesystem).

>Sorry for
> the additional questions but it would be a clearer
> understanding for me if you would answer them.
> Thanks much for your help.  BTW, I'll eventually do
> this but I may dally for a bit and will post the
> result when I get to it.  Thanks again,

No problem. We all run into issues at times, and when it's our primary 
system it can be especially nerve wracking. You're lucky that it's still 
usable if there is filesystem corruption or goofiness in it...like I 
said, you may want to still look up doing an FSCK at boot time. There's 
a file you can create (using "sudo touch") in the root directory to tell 
Ubuntu to perform a repair at boot time, if you're interested. You might 
find it in the Man pages. *DO NOT RUN FSCK TO REPAIR A RUNNING FILESYSTEM*.