Could somebody help me a little bit to clean out my crappy system?
I hope this is the right section. I'm new to this forum
Here is the situation (it's a long story).
(Edit: I forgot to say: I'm quite new to Linux.)
A couple weeks ago, I decided to upgrade my Linux Mint 18.X (don't actually remember, maybe 18.3) to Linux Mint 19. The upgrade seemed to be successful.
After the upgrade, everything seemed okay too, except some part of the graphical environment (dunno if it's cinnamon or another package, in fact). First, the icons were the old ones, not the new ones, and then, when I put my mouse on the bottom right icons there was a black line appearing at the separation between the taskbar and the desktop, and sometimes the right part of the wallpaper became black too... so there was already something wrong.
So, I said something like "well, maybe I should reinstall cinnamon". And I did so. No, I tried to do so: of course, the command sudo apt-get --reinstall cinnamon didn't work, for some reason (again, I don't remember the error, but it was saying something like "I didn't found the package cinnamon", I didn't really understand). I tried to uninstall it, and then reinstall it, manually (apt-get remove cinnamon, apt-get install cinnamon); the uninstall worked but then I was unable to reinstall it. (Again, it didn't find the right package or something. It suggested another package, but when I tried to install this other package I had the same error but with another package name.)
So at this moment, I had no more desktop environment, only command lines.
I don't really know what I did then but in the end I wasn't able to reinstall what was missing. The rest of the system was working correctly with the command line though.
So, I boot on a LiveUSB of LM 19, I made a disk image of the partition (where there is the system, but also some files, some programs, etc.) and then I made a fresh install of LM19 (I formatted the partition for the reinstall, of course). Now the system is working, but I need to restore my programs and my files.
I tried several things, here are the results:
- If, after a fresh install, I only restore the /home directory, of course the system works... but not perfectly. In fact, I have the same problem as I had just after the update: it's working but the old icons are back and there are the same glitches as described above.
- If, after a fresh install, I only restore the /var and /opt directories, it's all fine.
- If, after a fresh install, I only restore the /etc directory, first the graphical environment doesn't work and I can't run commands as root (it has something to do this the "sudoers" config file"). That's rather logical, since this directory is for config files, and the restored config files may make to files or programs that are not there.
I searched what directories I should restore (generally speaking) but there is no consensus. I found that generally people backup (and restore) /home (obviously), /var, /opt, and sometimes also /srv, /root and /usr/local. I must admit that I didn't searched for the purpose of all of those directories (I know, I should).
I would like some help to:
- figure out, in the /home directory, what is causing the glitches and putting the old icons.
- find what directories I need to restore in order to have all my files and programs back
- if, after the restoration, the system doesn't work properly, what is the origin of the problem
Of course if you need me to try something, or give some further information, there's no problem.
Thank you for reading this, and a big thank to the people who will help me.
F2b.
