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

[cecrops at herring.sandwich.net]

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.