Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

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pearldrums

Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by pearldrums »

Hey, I'm not sure if this really fits into another category so I'm just posting in "other topics".

I just switched from Ubuntu to a clean install of Mint(MATE). I tried to like Unity but couldn't. But thats not important. I have a tendency to just haul off and do things I think I can do, and sometimes have destructive consequences. I had my home directory from ubuntu on a totally separate partition, to help with upgrades. After installing Mint, I created a second user with admin privlidges with a home directory other than /home (/media/home to be exact, which was probably a poor decision, but i planned on deleting it when i was done anyway). I logged onto that second account and edited my fstab to automatically mount my other partition as /home. Then I deleted the original root home folder that was created in the instal and tried to double-check that I had everything correct by doing

Code: Select all

sudo usermod -d /home/USERNAME USERNAME
. (OK I wasn't actually double checking, this is just a summary, i had previously moved my other account to /media/USERNAME too because like i said... i was kind of just making this stuff up as I went)

Long story short, it didn't work and I cannot log into that user. There actually is a lot more to the story, I have been playing with this for a couple of hours, but I think these are all of the important details. Here is the line I added to fstab:
UUID="82756233-7961-4858-903b-ec371de27700" /home ext3 defaults 0 2
I am not used to UUIDs so I'm not sure if this is correct, however, when I log into my other account, and navigate to /home it shows the contents of the partition I'm looking for, so I think i did it correct. Is the home directory from Ubuntu somehow not compatible with Mint? I wouldn't think so, but as I have eluded to before... I dont' really know what I'm talking about.

Help. I'm lost.
Last edited by LockBot on Wed Dec 28, 2022 7:16 am, edited 1 time in total.
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pearldrums

Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by pearldrums »

Oh, I should also note that I did to a chown on /home/USERNAME as well.
wavespot
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Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by wavespot »

pearldrums wrote:Oh, I should also note that I did to a chown on /home/USERNAME as well.
Try :

sudo chown -R user. /home/user

of course replace 'user' with your username
pearldrums

Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by pearldrums »

Good point, forgot about that -R there. However it still did not fix the problem. When I try to log into that account i get following 3 messages:

No exec line in the session file: ubuntu. Running the GNOME failsafe session instead.

Could not find the GNOME installation, will try running the "failsafe xterm" sessino.

Cannot find "xterm" to start a failsafe session.


I'm about to go google those, but i figured i would first post my results.
pearldrums

Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by pearldrums »

Alright, I'm not finding a lot on yahoo as of yet (yeah... using yahoo now... profit sharing for mint!). A few hits from years past about upgrading from various systems including a vanilla debian and a ubuntu distro. But I think it may have to do something with hidden settings files created in the home folder and an imcompatability between the ubuntu distrubution that I had originally used the directory for, and the current Mint distribution that I'm using.

Could this be possible? Should I just create a new home directory for my account and then copy those hidden files to the partition I'm trying to get work (under the correct user), and then change the home directory for that user back the the partition i'm trying to get working?
wavespot
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Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by wavespot »

That's weird, the first message talks about session file : they are located in /usr/share/gnome-session/sessions directory, not in your home... But wait, how did you switched from ubuntu/unity to mint/mate ? Seems like you have installed mint wihtout formating, and now you have a mix of 2 distros in there
pearldrums

Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by pearldrums »

Yeah... this may or may not be the correct way of doing it, but I partitioned my hard drive into space for ubuntu, then space for my home folder, and moved my home into said partition. When I went to install mint, all i did was re-format the non-home partition (wipeing my ubuntu distro). Now I'm trying to hook up with my old home. I was thinking that because mint is based off ubuntu I wouldn't have too many problems, and I wasn't sure what all was stored in the home directory (other than personal data) to be honest.

I'm starting to get a grasp of what all "home" really is and I'm thinking the best option is to just first move my old home into a new folder, then create a new home folder on that partition and move my personal files from the old home into the new one. I'll give it a shot.
cchaverri

Re: Trouble changing to home directory on other partition

Post by cchaverri »

I got into your post due to similar issues I had on my migration to Linux Mint (Maya) from Ubuntu 13.04 (Raring). My family home desktop where my young kids, wife & I have individual accounts on it, stopped working properly due to my resent upgrade from 12.10 (Quantal) with Linux kernel 3.5.28 I found that kernel 3.8.0-19 freezes and crashed immediately after accessing my account. By changing Grub to the previous kernel, Raring works fine, but could not find an easily default set to kernel 3.5. Similar issues arosed with one of my laptops with the past Ubuntu version and kernel, but as a new kernel small upgrade were available, those issues dissapeared. That family desktop has my kids school work, my wife's laptop backup & mirror files and my work laptop backup and mirror account. So, I also use it as a RDP from inside my home LAN, and has various virtual machines on it.

I have used for some time the separated home partition according to this reference (https://help.ubuntu.com/community/Parti ... ome/Moving). So I used a USB flash memory with a live Linux Mint and used the 3rd shown process of installing it manually and deleting the root 10GB partition and doing a fresh & new installation on it. Why Mint 12.04 ? Because it's a long time support on it. I found also some minor issues on 12.10 on my family's desktop that I did not have time to resolve them.

My family had no problem to switch to Unity and I installed the Cairo-Dock on their accouts for making it easier.

Now I am using Cinnamon on all accounts. I just finished the upgrade and had no time to test Cairo Dock on it.

For setting the other 3 accounts I first created them by "useradd" (without any option). Then I "chown -R" all the existing home accounts, because I found some different users assigned to other incorrect folder/files on some of them. Finally I created the user passwords. I tested each account with the GUI and got messages indicating similar message window to your messages ("No exec line in the session file: ubuntu. Running the GNOME failsafe session instead. Could not find the GNOME installation, will try running the "failsafe xterm" session. Cannot find "xterm" to start a failsafe session.") So I set the sessions to a Cinnamon one. (I could also set them to a Gnome classical one).

Please indicate if you resolve your issues.

Claude
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