[xubuntu-users] Desktop fails to start after login - after 13.04 to 13.10 upgrade

[Benjamin Shadwick]

There's so much baggage stored in your home directory, though, that it
seems like preserving it across a reinstall would negate half of the
advantages of doing a reinstall in the first place.

Case in point: Chris' issue was solved by getting rid of a corrupt xfce4
config in his home directory. Chances are, if he had /home on a separate
partition and reinstalled the OS, the problem would still be there.

Personally, I just make backups of /home, /etc, and /opt (the latter being
where I install stuff that doesn't come from an APT repo) to a remote drive
(e.g. another computer on the LAN) so that I can hand-migrate stuff back
after a reinstall.


Regarding using synaptic to reinstall packages: Does it know to mark
dependency packages as automatically installed, or does it end up marking
everything as manually installed? I hate having dependencies listed as
manually installed, because it means they don't then get removed if I
remove the only packages that depend on them.


On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 1:20 PM, Cody Smith <cody.smith9202 at gmail.com>wrote:

> also, on the subject of making reinstallations easier, a seperate /home
> partition goes a long way. as for packages, synaptic has a method of
> generating a list of installed packages that can be plugged into synaptic
> on the new install so that it can install those packages again one go.
> instructions here:
> http://askubuntu.com/questions/168352/how-do-i-generate-a-package-download-list
>
> just make sure to save the generated package list somewhere it won't be
> lost in the reinstall, such as the /home partition.
>
> --c_smith
>
>
> On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 12:37 PM, Benjamin Shadwick <benshadwick at gmail.com
> > wrote:
>
>> Closest thing I can find is ~/.cache/upstart/startxfce4.log or possible
>> /var/log/lightdm/*.log, but I'm not sure how useful they are.
>>
>>
>> On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 11:31 AM, Chris Green <cl at isbd.net> wrote:
>>
>>> On Fri, Dec 27, 2013 at 07:21:54PM +0000, Chris Green wrote:
>>> >
>>> > >    - While not logged into the GUI desktop, rename the
>>> ~/.config/xfce4
>>> > >    directory and then try to log into the desktop. This will result
>>> in the
>>> > >    use of default XFCE desktop settings for your account.
>>> >
>>> > OK, I'll try that.
>>> >
>>> ... and now I get a desktop after logging in!  :-)
>>>
>>> Thank you, I'll have to recustomise it of course but that's not too much
>>> work, it's not very intricately configured.
>>>
>>> Is there any way to work out what broke things - i.e. is there some sort
>>> of xcfe error log that will tell me what I broke?
>>>
>>> --
>>> Chris Green
>>>
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>>
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