[NBLUG/talk] Ubuntu 12.04->14.04 upgrade gone awry

[Michael Dooley]

On 08/29/2014 08:57 PM, Mitch Patenaude wrote:

> I don't know why I always forget how painful the upgrade process is, but
> I've managed to once again render my ubuntu machine almost unusable, and
> I'm hoping that somebody here can help.
>
> I'll spare you the details other than to say after much hacking about with
> apt-* and dpkg I've managed to make it boot, and can even get into a window
> manager by setting the defaults to kdm and kde.  The problem is that I
> don't like KDE, and would much rather use some gnome based desktop, but
> they all wedge on login.  I can't find anything useful in /var/log/Xorg.log
> or /var/log/syslog.
>
> I've tried removing (well, moving to a different directory) ~/.gnome* and
> ~/.gtk*, but that didn't help.
>
> Any other ideas out there?
>
> Thanks,
>    - Mitch

Don't give up. You have a working system, it just isn't exactly working 
the way you want it to.

What I'd advise is to do a bit of sleuthing before you utterly give up 
and go the way of CentOS or knoppix.

For starters, you could create another user account with administrative 
privileges, log out of the kde account and see if you can log in to the 
other admin. account. If you can, then you know that you can configure 
that account to be as you wish. From there its almost easy to get a 
functional "working" ubuntu 14.04 up and running.

Check permissions on your kde home and see if there might be something 
amiss there. There are other "upgrade" problems that commonly arise but 
until you know the state of your original account, there's not much I 
can tell you about fixing it - or screwing it up further...

Good luck Mitch. It *can* be fixed with a little patience.

-- 
Michael