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...
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