My .files are always included under home directory; that is why I keep my home folders on a separate dfevice so I can backup home just for those and I include the .* to ensure they are included. I just now did a timeshift restore to 08.23.24 and got to watch the dry run. .local, .var, etc. are all being “created” which means they are not there., So I am going to let that run and see what it restores.
Stranger yet, each time I reboot in MX AHS (never changed the kernel) fewer windows open and now I can use their menus to exit. This last time, only barrier opened at startup whereas before there were 4 windows open. Still only one generic workspace, but I can recreate those.
But for clarity’s sake: should I make CZ images or just parts (to include the EFI) so that I can restore one distro without disturbing the other in the future should this happen?
We resolved that a while ago.
You can restore any single partition from a savedisk image. There is no need to use saveparts, a savedisk is just a collection of partitions.
You can see that if you go to your backup disk and look inside one of the image directories. You will see all the partitions it contains… sometimes several files per partition. Lots of other interesting files there too… eg a smartctl output for your disk.
This is weird.
The session saver usually saves whatever you had on the screen when you do shutdown. If you crash, it does not get to save what you currently have, so it boots back to what you had on previous shutdown
so
it is as if the session manager has saved some rubbish…and every time you shutdown it saves the current copy of the same rubbish
so
how about you try disabling the session manager… ie turn off the session management… there is a button somewhere in the menus…that might clear it.
Then turn it on again and it should have a clean slate.
Okay. I will look for that once the next Timeshift restore completes. Taking it back to the very last one I had and all those windows opened upon boot, sitting back on top of each other. I am going right now to restore the earliest hourly from last week. Then I am not going to mess with Timeshift anymore.
Maybe disabling the session manager will fix that and from there I can ensure everything is as it was before making a new image in CZ.
I know it might sound implausible, but is there anyway the Arch distro has interfered with the MX?
I only know that none of this happened while I had several partitions and other Linux on each. But once I took it back to 3 partitions and only installed Arch on the one (left the other blank for now) I spent most of my time in it learning and setting it up. Occasionally, I would boot back into MX just because things work there. And they did for an entire month. It was only this past weekend, when I had not booted it for a week that I found the issue.
Only if it wrote on the MX filesystem.
They dont share home directories, so that is unlikely unless you made a mistake
I have never had 2 dual booted distros interfere.
So you basically did nothing with MX and its session saving self disintegrated?
Are you sure everything that Arch touches is separate from MX?
Did you mount the MX filesystem at any stage?
I cant imagine anything?
Maybe have a look at the date on the .xsession file in MX
I have been in so many distros this week that I cannot be sure, but I think the MX folders were locked to me from the Arch side. I know in Manjaro, you have to give access to mount the LM partition. I will check.
I do that often in my dual Linux boot machines. When I had Kubuntu with LM, I would just grab the file I needed from its folder and copy it to the LM side. In fact, both root partitions were always mounted as I hopped between them effortlessly.
Hmmm, I still do not see how mounting the MX in Arch to access something would cause changes in its system.
But if that is possible, I will be sure not to do that.
Okay. Just logged into Budgie and my normal sticky note appeared on the home screen. Then it said I have 76 updates. That’s strange because in the Xfce session, even after going backwards in TS, I opened MX package manager expecting to see lots of updates and it did not show any.
So thank you. By just using a different desktop I still have my system in tact. I can deal with Budgie.
Okay. I do not know exactly what I did to fix it, but it definitely had something to do with session saving. Since I was very limited in the problematic desktop (Xfce), I kept playing around with both MX tools and KDE settings: moving the panel so I could access it (though some things did not work), choosing start with an empty session and then logging out and back in.
Suddenly, although the panels were in different places, all of my workspaces appeared again. Note that once I had turned off the session saving, each re-login would bring up a box for choosing the session I wanted (only default was there from last login) so after using that one and getting same results, at next login I deleted that one and it logged me back in and that is when all the windows were in the right place, their headers were visible with min/max/close buttons and the list (panel) showing all of my workspaces reappeared.
So now I am going to move the panels back to where I want them in settings and then figure out how to save this session as either default or name it somehow.
I do not know how the desktop session got overwritten or messed up, but I am thinking once I save this session, I should turn the “Save Destop Dession” back on, right?
Right. You want it to automatically save session when you logout or shutdown, I would think. That is what I do, and it overwrites the previously saved session.
I do believe you can also manually save a session at any time, I have never tried.
You could save your base session that way, I think.
I admire your persistance. I think we looked at everything except the now obvious
solution
Do you only session save in xfce? If you also session saved in Budgie or Plasma, it might clash… I dont know… just guessing.
I saved the session as default in XFCE. I do not plan on using the other desktops, so have not done anything than other login to them to see that the issue was not in those environments.
I did not find a way to rename the saved session, but did see that it has this morning’s timestamp on it.
For now, having saved manually, I left the autosave session unchecked and rebooted and had to choose session (default) and it loaded the working desktop in Xfce.
So far so good.
BUT, there now seems to be a permission issue that was not present before. I cannot access my external drive, and I tried to use the package manager to install something and it said something about I don’t have that permission.
In fact, to change the Timeshift settings, I could never get the app to start from start menu, so started the gui via CLI and it opened. Something has changed my permissions.
I just tried to look at the user.log and got the message: Error executing as another user: Not Authorized. This incident has been reported.
Whoa.
But I went into user management and the current user was NONE; from the dropdown I could choose “myviolinsings” user who was listed as an admin with sudo rights.
So I am somehow not logged in as me? I am the only user and I used my password to login.
So I logged out, checked that I am logging in as “myviolinsings” entered password, chose session and am logged in as myviolinsings, but still do not have permission to mount my ext SSD.
So I found a thread in MX Linux where user was experiencing same thing in not able to mount. I had at first used MX-Tweaks to check Enable Mounting of internal drives by non-root users. But each time I hit apply, it became “unchecked.” But using sudo in CLI and opening the app, it stayed checked after apply.
Then I could mount all the partitions and drives I chose. The thread mentioned something about policyKit issue. But what I found was this:
disk-manager-launcher
enter password
polkit-agent-helper-1: error response to PolicyKit daemon: GDBus.Error:org.freedesktop.PolicyKit1.Error. Failed: No session for cookie.
Then again with the Error executing command as another user: Not authorized.
Instead of just logging out/back in, I am going to reboot and see if the issue remains. Past that, I am clueless how to resolve PolicyKit violation.
Thanks,
Sheila
UPDATE:
I don’t think we will ever know what caused the PolicyKit issue as a reboot fixed everything. I was able to view all logs, mount drives, ran same CLI command without error this time.
So unless anything further arises, I would say MX Linux is working as it should.
Does whoami say you are someone else?
I have never heard of someone logging in as X and then being Y
This may be relevant.
It seems system user cant login. Is there some way to see if you have become a system user?
All this corruption of files and settings.? You might do a virus check with clam and a disk check with smartctl, and a memory check.
I think you can fix it by deleting yourself as a user (without deleting the home directory), then adding yourself again ( or maybe use usermod that might be safer) … but that is not the point… why are these things happening?
Found something:
it might be an nfs side effect… did you do any nfs mounts with root-squash?
Another thing:
Check that you own all the files that are in your home directory, including dot files.
Thanks @nevj believe me, now that it is back to perfect alongside my Arch distro, I am making another image of the entire disk. I used to only do one every month. Now I guess I will need to make it a weekly thing. Just cannot rely on Timeshift. Images have never failed me.
The time it would have taken to make that image is way less than what I have spent trying to resolve it.
