[sf-lug] todays meeting at enchanted cafe

[jim]

   i believe part of the problem is that earlier 
releases of a distro set the default admin user 
to have a UID of 500 and later releases set it 
to 1000. 
   bobby can correct me. 



On Mon, 2011-01-03 at 00:36 -0800, Rick Moen wrote:
> Quoting Bobbie Sellers (bliss at sfo.com):
> 
> > I had my own problems in the last couple of days.  I tried to
> > carve a partition out of Windows but ended
> > up destroying Windows on my machine.  It took me from Noon to 3 PM
> > on Saturday to figure that out.
> 
> Bummer.
> 
> > Then I tried an install of Kubunto to my new and empty partition but
> > it failed to be able to access my home directory.
> 
> I'm guessing that your 'home directory' is on a separate filesystem?
> 
> Sad to say, there are good reasons why you should not try to share a
> /home filesystem between multiple different Linux distributions
> (/Unixes).  In practice, it causes more problems than it solves.  One
> noatble problem is version skew in the dotfile directories.  If you use
> GNOME, for example, you have ~/.gnome2, .gconf2, and a bunch of other
> subdirectory trees within your home directory where GNOME's
> internal record-keeping is stored.  The problem is created because GNOME
> _usually_ (but not always) tries to preserve forward-compatibility
> within its dotfile directories, but doesn't even aspire to making those
> directories backwards compatible.  Therefore, any time distro A has even
> a modestly different GNOME version from what distro B provides, one of
> the distros is going to write dotfile contents likely to cause the other
> distro's software to fail (segfault, etc.).  And that's just GNOME.
> 
> That aside, I cannot tell what 'failed to be able to access' means in
> current context.  Perhaps you mean 'cannot mount'?
> 
> You might have ended up trying to unknowingly violate some of the
> built-in rules of how partition tables work.  In my experience, the more
> people mess around with multibooting, the more likely they are to run
> afoul of those built-in rules because they are unable to Keep It Simple.
> 
> I keep advising newcomers to Linux to go easy on the clever partitioning
> tricks and multibooting, and they seem to ignore that advice to their
> regret.  Just a thought.
> 
> 
> > In the process it wiped out my good nVidia driver and my printer
> > configuration.  
> 
> Suggestion:  Now is the time to start the process of making safety
> copies of things you rely on.  For example, if (as I would guess) you
> were relying on a particular release of the proprietary Nvidia video
> driver set, and on a particular /etc/x11/xorg.conf file you created to
> use it, there's no reason whatsoever why you shouldn't have had safety
> copies of both of those, in one or more place unlikely to see damage,
> for safekeeping.
> 
> Here is my scheme for backup and restore of my linuxmafia.com server.
> Note that I've carefully identified which files and directories actually
> matter, i.e., those I would miss and are worth making safety copies of:
> http://linuxmafia.com/faq/Admin/linuxmafia.com-backup.html
> 
> 
> > As a matter of fact I was up until 3 AM Sunday morning working on that
> > problem which related it seems to the Distro makers deciding to change
> > the users to new numbered groups and where as I had been bliss with a
> > group of 500 which  was the group that the /home directory belonged
> > to.  It had changed my group number to 1000.  I had to delete my old
> > user bliss with that group and create a new user bliss with the group
> > 500.
> 
> No, you really didn't.
> 
> If you just use the chown/chgrp commands, you can fix UID and GID
> changes really easily.
> 
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