[NBLUG/talk] Configuration problems with user interface and wireless connectivity

[Michael Tucker]

In legacy operating systems I would ask you, did you create restore or
backup points before any upgrades that have adversely affected you? And
that's about as much help as I am going to be with your problem.
On May 18, 2013 7:48 AM, <cecrops at herring.sandwich.net> wrote:

> Requesting help with some problems I've been having in Mint.
>
>
> Problem 1: My window manager is all bolloxed up
>
> Sorry for the lack of description here, but multiple things are going
> wrong in multiple window managers. Let me provide some background. Gnome
> has been losing features on subsequent updates to the point that it's only
> good for launching a terminal window anymore. Since I don't want to wait an
> extra minute of boot time to run terminal commands, I go back to XFCE which
> does not place title bars on windows, so I can not move windows around. I
> have had the best luck configuring XFCE to begin with an open xterm and
> running enlightenment_start from inside there. (EDIT: I got the title bars
> back by adding "exec xfwm4" to my .xsession file.)
>
> I have assumed that these problems are due to ancient configuration files
> that new versions of the software don't recognize, with a failure to
> upgrade the configuration files in /home as apt installs new versions of
> the packages. However, the Unity desktop is supposed to be completely new
> and should not be affected by this type of problem, but when I run it, I
> get:
>
> * No background image
> * No names beneath the desktop icons, so good luck telling text files apart
> * No toolbars are visible on the screen
> * No toolbars appear when moving the mouse near the screen edges
> * Left-clicking anywhere does nothing
> * Middle-clicking anywhere does nothing
> * Right-clicking anywhere does nothing
> * Ctrl-Alt-Backspace did not work. I had to shut down my computer at the
> power switch.
>
> In short, it's completely unusable.
>
> Force-reinstalling the gnome and xfce packages does not fix any of my
> problems.
>
> Questions for the audience:
>
> * If I blow away everything under ~/.config and ~/.gnome2*, will the
> window managers restore the default desktops automatically or will I have
> prevented myself from using them again? (I recall doing this and the answer
> was no on both counts.)
> * Is there anything in ~/.config that I should back up before deleting it?
>
> Note: If I destroy my X configuration, I will not be able to recover or
> restore anything from the Internet (see Problem 2 below), so I will not be
> able to reinstall packages.
>
> Wiping and reinstalling is not an answer. KDE is not an answer. I want to
> learn how things work these days instead of running away from the problem.
>
>
> Problem 1.1: Ubuntu desktop overwrote Mint desktop
>
> I'm running Mint. As per all of the guidelines that I have seen, I point
> my sources.list to both the Mint and Ubuntu repos. My Gnome desktop appears
> to use Ubuntu's configuration files since it's brown and not green.
> Attempting to force-reinstall the mintdesktop package gives me the error
> "Reinstallation of mintdesktop is not possible, it cannot be downloaded."
> This may be related to the other desktop problems that I am seeing.
>
> * How do I see the pretty green desktop again? Please don't tell me to try
> SuSE. I'll make that joke for you.
> * How do I prioritize my sources.list so the downstream vendor's packages
> take priority over those of the upstream vendor? The file currently lists
> downstream sources before upstream sources.
>
>
> Problem 2: Wireless configuration requires X and DHCP
>
> I want my wireless network to be available and configured with a static IP
> when the system boots. I used to connect to the network with a custom
> iwconfig script in init.d because that was the only way to connect to
> wireless at the time. Now my wireless will only connect if I am in X, and I
> cannot find any combination of iwconfig settings that will connect me to my
> wireless network outside of X. This leaves me unable to connect to the
> internet when X stops working after apt-get upgrade, which happens more
> often than it should but that's a different problem.
>
> More annoyingly, my wireless will only connect if the DHCP client dhclient
> is running; it will die if dhclient is killed; and it will only connect
> through DHCP. I had been working off a static IP in my previous
> installations of Linux. dhclient cannot be permanently killed because
> network-manager restarts it, and network-manager cannot be permanently
> killed because upstart restarts it. It's like being infected with the old
> Friar Tuck and Robin Hood viruses except one of them got into init.
>
> I have tried running wpa_supplicant at the cli with various parameters,
> but it does not seem to be enough or I am giving it the wrong parameters.
>
> network-manager seems to run at the CLI but it does not help me connect to
> the wireless network. iwlist scan runs correctly and sees the network.
>
> All of the documents that I have found on configuring wireless networks in
> Ubuntu assume that all configurations are done through the Gnome user
> interface, as if configuration files do not exist, as if the UI tools do
> not save their configurations anywhere. I have found a few config files on
> the disk but one is encrypted and none of the others have any settings that
> I am not already feeding into iwconfig.
>
> * What do I need to do to get a wireless network up from the recovery
> console?
> * Where can I find which component is doing the network configuration in X
> and what it does? Could it be Gnome, network-manager, or a new OpenDesktop
> component that I've never heard of?
> * I intend to have no dynamic IPs on this box. How do I turn off dhclient
> in such a way that I can turn it back on in the future if I ever want it?
> Deleting the binary is just a hack, and apt would reinstall it anyway.
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