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On 06/01/18 12:17, Richard Brown wrote: > Thanks for all the replies. Mr Meowski's reply summed up where I am > exactly. He couldn't have made it clearer and it really helped. So > this morning I tested the idea out on my laptop (it has no data on it) > and totally messed up the install. I was using Fedora 27 and had the > same crashing issues. So I thought I would install kde on Fedora. I > don't know how I managed to get it so wrong but on the boot menu I > ended up with an install of Ubuntu and install of Fedora. > > So I'm installing a fresh version of Ubuntu on my laptop. I have since > been reading around the possible problems. I have been using Dropbox > and the demon running that has caused Gnome 3 users problems. Some > extensions have been causing some issues. I am going to persevere with > Fedora on the main desktop and see if I stop using the Dropbox demon > and cease using Gnome extensions whether that improves things. > > I do have data backed up thankfully but I am persevering. If it still > causes issues I will be getting hold of a ssd and using that to run as > my primary drive and have the 2 sata disks as seperate from the system > disk. I think I taught myself a lesson here! > > Thanks for the continued help. Your problems continue to fly so thick and fast it's difficult to keep up with them! The best hope I can offer you is that if you keep at it not only will you eventually get things working but with any luck you'll learn quite a lot of stuff while you're at it, which is always a worthwhile thing. Are you going to concentrate on just one PC at a time for a bit? It might be a good idea to consolidate all your efforts in a single place and keep smashing away at it until it toes the line. As your laptop is apparently a blank slate that might well be the ideal testbed for experimenting? Perhaps try and get that completely functional with a distro, DE and general environment you're happy with and once that's working, adapt it to the Kabylake box? It would help a lot if we know exactly what laptop it is: make and model please with any supplementary information (are you plugging it into an external monitor, are you using extra hardware, etc, etc). A couple of observations: forget Dropbox and even Gnome extensions being a legitimate concern here, the problems you are facing go much deeper than that (also they're just a red herring - I've had and continue to have both running on countless systems and VMs for years and years with precisely no problems). An exception to that would be _if_ you are installing a lot of random Gnome shell extensions from weird sources but I seriously doubt that is the case - as shipped by default Gnome includes very few extensions and the majority are disabled anyway. So just toss that idea out immediately. Something that probably is going to be an issue on the other hand is my favourite bugbear of system firmware which I keep banging on about on this list. We are now too far into the game to keep ignoring the UEFI vs BIOS issue which is the most likely explanation for your weird boot entries. If we stick with the laptop for the moment and completely ignore your Kabylake PC, do you know if the laptop's firmware is set to UEFI or BIOS mode? It makes a colossal difference going forward and informs almost every step of the installation process from how you create your USB installer from the vendor supplied ISO file, how your computer will recognise and then bootstrap the machine, how the installer will format and partition the disk(s) and layout, how your GRUB bootloader will configure and boot the system and how your computer firmware will activate and store boot records. I can't really overstate how important this step is and how critical it is to understand the implications. Do you know how to access the firmware on your laptop? It's done by pressing one of an annoyingly random selection of keys in the first few moments after power on - F12, F8, Del, Esc or something else entirely. Once we know the make/model of your laptop it's easy to find out. The very first job during installation is to access the firmware on the target system and poke around to A: gather information and B: configure options appropriately. In the firmware you can (read: "NEED TO") set configuration options appropriately - I'm not going to try and tell you exactly what they are in advance because they vary hugely between disparate systems, firmware revisions and so on. This step is critical and if you don't do it properly it will continue to haunt you down the line as unexpected corollaries pop up. That being said, as a general example, all legacy BIOS and/or CSM crap *must* be killed with fire - it's 2018 for god's sake! Full UEFI mode needs to be enabled, Secure Boot stuff on the other hand needs to be disabled for Linux (unless you really know what you're doing). Virtualization is nearly always disabled out of the box for some incomprehensible reason, so that will need toggling on. POST type, boot delay, system verbosity, power/performance ratios and switchable graphics options all need to be examined and configured appropriately, if you value your sanity and don't just want to half-arse things. This is only the first step in the whole process, but one of the most important. The only way you'll ever make proper progress is to take things calmly, slowly and logically working your way up the chain one step at a time and understanding (at least roughly, nobody expects you to become a 10th-dan ninja sensei in UEFI just for this!) what you are doing and why. Grasping at straws, hopping between different systems and throwing "fixes" copied semi-randomly from moronic tech blogs on the internet will not only not get you anywhere useful but will actively demoralise and confuse you (I really have no idea how you possibly could have come to the conclusion that Dropbox is an issue here for example - what hapless internet commentard led you up that garden path?). Slow and steady is the way forward - concentrate on one task at a time. The master list goes something like this for a ground up install on a tricky machine: 1: Recon and configure firmware correctly (also, update it if needed) 2: Make installation medium correctly with proper tool 3: Boot installer correctly 4: Install system properly, configuring disk(s) is super critical 5: Ensure basic installation is 100% correct - redo steps 1-4 otherwise 6: Post-install configuration and updates 7: Isolate outstanding issues and bugs/glitches 8: Fix them one at a time 9: Migrate data back on to target machine as appropriate 10: When the system is 100% ready, immediately backup (pref. image it) 11: Document what you've done to save the effort next time! Unwritten step #0 as ever is backup everything important before you even start. Finally, ignore everything that everyone else has mentioned about /homes: they're not wrong per se and it's actually useful advice but in this context it's just not helpful at all. You can't even get a single working distro with a single working user on a single working PC yet so let's just stick with the basics eh? Ball's back in your court chief. Cheers -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG https://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/listfaq