Upgrade from 16.04.x to 18.04.3 broke system - was Upgrade paths from UbuntuMATE 16.04.x and 18.04.x to 19.10

[Little Girl]

Hey there,

Bret Busby wrote:
 
>I am thinking that
>
>"
>>>I tried the
>>>
>>>"
>>>Press Ctrl + Alt + F1 and log in there and run:
>>>
>>>sudo chown -R $USER:$USER $HOME
>>>Then press Ctrl + Alt + F7 and try to log in.
>>>"
>>>
>>>and got continuously scrolling screens of "Operation not
>>>permitted", relating to system files, so aborted it with <CTRL><C>
>>>then rebooted, and now, it displays the GRUB menu, I select
>>>Ubuntu, then it briefly displays a console login prompt, then the
>>>screen goes black, then it goes into an endless loop of black
>>>screen _> flash -> black screen.
>>>  
>"
>
>has eliminated the /home directory and corrupted the file system.

That command changed the ownership (chown) of all files in the
current user's ($USER) home directory ($HOME) recursively (-R) to the
current user ($USER) and also changed the group ownership of the
files to the current user(:$USER).

See the chown man page for the details:

http://manpages.ubuntu.com/manpages/trusty/man1/chown.1.html

>After various subsequent actions, upon rebooting, I now get a console
>login screen, and it does not progress beyond that screen.
>
>When I log in, I get
>"
>No directory, logging in with HOME=/
>-bash: cannot create temp file for here-document: No space left on
>device "
>
>So. I think that command has corrupted the filesystem.

I suspect that when you ran the command above, you were root rather
than you, so you changed ownership of your home to root. This page
might help with that:

https://stackoverflow.com/questions/47827893/no-directory-logging-in-with-home

Your issue is bigger than ownership, though, as Oliver Grawert
pointed out in this thread. You're out of room. Is this a virtual
machine and/or are you able to give it more space?

>I do not know, but I think the only thing left for me to do, now, is
>wait until 19.10 is released (as I previously mentioned, the
>UbuntuMATE Release Notes for 19.10, state that it has multiple fixes,
>and is supposed to be better for nVIDIA stuff (the affected computer
>has nVIDIA Optimus, which. I think, has thus far been dealt with by
>nouveau) ), and do a "clean install", replacing the current
>UbuntuMATE system with a new install of 19.04 .

I always do clean installations rather than upgrades, so that
sounds like a solid plan to me. You may not have to wait, however, if
the above solution helps and if you take care of your space issue.

>I should probably have progressively updated the system, to 19.10,
>instead of wrecking the system by trying the fixes that I tried.

I feel badly about that since your experiments were from pages I had
mentioned. Hopefully you've made backups so that you can start over.
Trying fixes can definitely be risky and should usually be thoroughly
researched. In the crafting and/or handy worlds, we have a saying
that goes: "Measure twice. Cut once." I think that applies nicely to
experimentation with operating systems, too.

-- 
Little Girl

There is no spoon.