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Well, I tracked down the culprit in this mystery and the trail pointed to dumb user, not bad video driver. Prior to installing Linux Mint, I had used Clonezilla to save an image of the home partition. To be on the safe side, I immediately restored the image to a spare partition to see if a restore would be successful. I didn't realize that this gave the spare partition (with the clone) the same UUID as the original home partition. In fact, since I had done this step several days earlier, the extra partition was completely out of sight, out of mind. Installing the nVidia driver, led me to reboot. When I rebooted, the cloned partition was mounted instead of the real home partition (unbeknownst to me). All of a sudden my home partition had the wrong permissions (owned by a different user), which was the original problem I blamed on the nVidia package. I fixed the permissions, tinkered with the video drivers (trying to track down the issue), rebooted a couple times, and at some point was back in the real home partition. A few changes later, another reboot, I was back in the cloned partition. The whole time, I didn't realize that I was mounting different home partitions. I just noticed really bizarre stuff with my settings and permissions. Oh well. I think there's another thread where I'm advocating trust for user intelligence ;-) Will On 12/12/2012 10:38 PM, Will Rico wrote: > Jerry, that's a good suggestion (to try this as "root"). I think > however, I'm going to wait until the weekend and try this with a fresh > install on a separate partition. I'm a little gun shy about reverting > settings for a third time. > > Thanks for the good tips! > Will > > On 12/12/2012 07:37 AM, Jerry Feldman wrote: >> Most of these settings are stored in "hidden" files in your home >> directory. >> An 'ls -al' will show you all your files, hidden or otherwise as well as >> the permissions. >> Once you determine that these files may have incorrect ownership, then: >> 'sudo chown -R <you>:<your group> .' >> Should set everything back to the correct ownership. >> >> -- Another test may be safer >> 1., become root using sudo ' sudo -s -H' >> 2. cd /tmp. >> 3. Check permissions and ownership of files in /tmp >> 4. reinstall the nvidia driver. Something like 'apt-get install >> --reinstall nvidia' >> After reinstalling, check the permissions and ownership in the /tmp >> directory. >> 5. Restart X by logging out, and logging back in. Your home directory >> should be untouched, and it any file permission has changed in /tmp, >> then the nvidia package is suspect. >> >> >> >> On 12/11/2012 11:01 PM, Will Rico wrote: >>> Thanks for the tips guys! I tried to recreate the problem and ran >>> into a couple of new ones, lol... >>> >>> (1) I couldn't figure out how to switch to the Gallium driver. After >>> searching online to no avail, I tried switching the "Driver" line in >>> xorg.conf to "gallium." That didn't seem to work. When I logged back >>> in, the display was super low resolution and listed the driver as i915. >>> >>> (2) I figured that removing the package for the nvidia driver would >>> switch me back to Gallium. It didn't. >>> >>> (3) I reinstalled the nvidia driver. Nowhere along the way did it >>> change the permissions on my home directory. However... >>> >>> (4) When I got back into Cinnamon, I lost settings that you wouldn't >>> expect I would have lost. For example: >>> a- My language setting was lost >>> b- My panel settings were back to the default >>> c- My window settings (e.g. where the maximize/minimize/close buttons >>> appear) were back to the default >>> d- I had my GMail account configured in Pidgin for GTalk and the >>> account was gone. >>> e- Also, in Pidgin, I had disabled the lib-notify plug-in. It was >>> re-enabled. >>> f- When I started Firefox, it checked for plug-in compatability, >>> which it only does the first time you run it after installing a new >>> version, so it seems to have forgotten it had already done this >>> g- In Terminal, I had changed the colors. These went back to the >>> defaults. >>> h- When I look at my bash history, I don't see any of the apt-get >>> commands I used for this experiment or the editing of the xorg.conf >>> file, which leads me to believe I may be going crazy. >>> >>> I'm guessing some or all of the above settings were all stored in my >>> home directory. So like I said, I couldn't recreate the original >>> problem, but I managed to create some new ones. >>> >>> Will >>> >>> On 12/11/2012 04:24 PM, Derek Martin wrote: >>>> On Tue, Dec 11, 2012 at 03:39:15PM -0500, Jerry Feldman wrote: >>>>> On 12/11/2012 01:53 PM, Derek Martin wrote: >>>>>> You could follow Bill's suggestion and pull apart the package and >>>>>> see >>>>>> what it does. Or you could just test it... Being very careful >>>>>> not to >>>>>> run anything else, log in to your system, change the driver back to >>>>>> gallium. Log out, and check your ownership and permissions. >>>>>> Then log >>>>>> in again, update it to nvidia again, and do your check again. >>>>>> >>>>> Possibly an easier way is to make sure everything is Kosher including >>>>> your home directory permissions and ownership, then after you have >>>>> verified, reinstall the package that you think caused the problems, >>>>> then >>>>> double check the ownership et. al. Then you can terminate your X >>>>> session >>>>> by logging out. You should be able to log in once again. Or if the >>>>> problem is the same as before, then you can assume that the >>>>> package you >>>>> installed is the culprit. >>>> Possibly easier, or possibly harder. It's almost exactly what I >>>> suggested, except it leaves out the step of returning the machine to >>>> the state it was in prior to upgrading the driver. If the problem is >>>> caused by an interaction between those two, skipping that step will >>>> obviously not trigger it... >>>> >> >> >> >> _______________________________________________ >> Discuss mailing list >> Discuss at blu.org >> http://lists.blu.org/mailman/listinfo/discuss >
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