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Re: [LUG] Mint 19.x Login Weirdness: SOLVED

 

On 19/11/2019 17:58, mr meowski wrote:
On 19/11/2019 12:12, Julian Hall wrote:

Finally, actually solved. 19.0 didn't like the /home folder - probably
some 19.2 config. files - so I downloaded a 19.2 iso and put that on a
USB stick. After a fresh install from that I am now able to log into
Mint 19.2 with my original login and /home folder.

One wrinkle I discovered along the way; I used my laptop to download the
iso and that complained about a lack of space on / too. As I hardly use
it that made me suspicious, and investigation showed that Timeshift had
been enabled somehow and had take 11Gb(!) of space with backups. I
disabled it which reclaimed the space, but it's worth noting for Mint 19
users. When I reinstalled on the desktop I disabled Timeshift straight
away.

I didn't want to say anything before but yeah, I guess it is kind of
solved now... sort of. You still  never even diagnosed the initial
problem and carpet bombed it out of existence by basically reinstalling
the entire laptop from scratch and copying in some/most of your home
folder contents afterwards. That is not a backup/restore and it's
definitely not fixing the problem either if you see what I mean so
technically you _still_ haven't solved anything!

As far as I can tell the root cause was the .Xauthority file corrupting in my /home folder. Having established that a new user could log in to X that pointed to my /home; from looking at it .Xauthority zero length with the backup being 50 bytes seemed a reasonable candidate. You are right though, if I had diagnosed /that/ before assuming the OS was corrupted it may have been a matter of minutes to solve.

As for the restore, now I know how to do it properly - live distro, check /dev, create mount points, mount backup and destination, then rsync one to the other.

I don't think Timeshift was the problem on the desktop, that only cropped up when I booted the laptop. It may be worth looking at that to automate backups in future, but then my current manual system works so I'm inclined not to mess with it.

By the way, do you want to know how you caused the problem in the first
place? It's because you've got a (really, really) bad habit of running
gui apps with sudo or as root.

Ahhh... that will be Mint's Update Manager and Bleachbit, as they are two GUIs I use regularly which instantly come to mind as requiring root. All other times, such as backup, I use the terminal. May be worth using 'apt-get update && apt-get dist-upgrade' in future and just letting the Update Manager tell me if something needs updating, but do the actual update in the terminal.

Kind regards,

Julian



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