Restore Failure
Restoring my computer after a fresh install of Ubuntu 10.04.
What works: Firefox, miro, virtualbox, konversation, bash, inkscape and evolution data (emails and filters)
What doesn’t work: any gnome setting, evolution accounts (mail, calendar, tasks), telepathy/empathy and theme.
I suspect it’s because of gconf. The more gconf hurts me, the more I’m persuaded to carry a demonic vendetta against it’s existence. I intend at every opportunity to convince supporters of it’s irrational and quaintly naive formulation. 
Do you think it was gconf that caused this?
Tags: gconf, Ubuntu
I haven’t tried a fresh install and keeping a home partition yet, as they rarely work perfectly, especially between distros. I find i’d rather upgrade the current install via the usual upgrade process or just back up the settings manually and do a complete fresh install.
I’ve always thought the gnome registry was a bad idea. The registry was a bad idea in windows. It was a bad idea when they put one in AIX and called it the Object Data Manager. It hasn’t been any better in Gnome.
CMD, how do you back it up manually? The inability to backup and mirror configuration the way I did back when programs used dot file and dot dirs has been a bane to me in recent years.
Edd
I just did an install and had all kinds of trouble, including losing Network Manager. After about an hour, I gave up and executed
gconftool –recursive-unset /
When I logged out and in again, everything was fine.
I don’t even bother with gnome settings. Most likely I screwed something up trying to tweak my system anyway. I delete of change the names of all .g* files and start with a fresh desktop. I do retain my .mozilla, .mozilla-thunderbird, .gftp, .bluefish,. and other such application directories.
I feel like Gconf (or the windows registry, which seems to be quite similar) is one of those things where if you got rid of it, you’d end up re-implementing a buggy version of it to fill the resulting gaps in functionality.
Oh, the home partition thing sucks! It might be the Gconf garbage. I partitioned mom’s Pc with the home partition when I installed Karmic Koala thinking that by the time I install Lucid I didn’t have to back everything up, but it failed. I had to back up and clean install everything. Installing wasn’t the hard part since I used a speedy usb drive on her AMD Phenom quad core monster, but the back up took hours!!!!
For empathy, I think Ubuntu One is synchronising the accounts, or something magical happend!
After my fresh install (I wanted to switch from 32bit to 64bit), I just restored my ssh and virtualbox configurations. Firefox was restored using “Weave” extension.
As for Gwibber, I decided to add my identi.ca account and I would see later for the other ones.
A few hours later, I opened Gwibber and I was surprised because there was 3 accounts configured: twice my identi.ca and once my twitter accounts. Gwibber somehow retrieve from somewhere (I suspect Ubuntu One) my previous accounts!
That was cool, magical but also pretty weird!
Issues with gconf usually just means you ran out of free space on your drive, at least for a little while and then it corrupted the settings.
Interestingly, just using text files, would be just as unsafe. We really need a better solution when this problems pops up.
Transactional filesystems would solve this, but a kernel interception when we ran out of space, (that displays some sort of .. ‘choose what to delete NOW .. interface .. before continuing any other proccess) could also help.
1) Messed up button order/position sneaked in 2 seconds b4 freeze.
2) Java moved to the partners repo and Java not installed by default.
3) Messed up X.org
4) grub2
5) I actually LIKE the brown Human theme. New ones? Not so much.
These are the things I see wrong with 10.04LTS.
I may install 10.04.1 or .2 LTS, but right now, 8.04.4LTS is fine (and also supported) until April 2011, so I’m good.
Gconf is a truly horrible idea. While well-intentioned, it only serves to make a mess of things. Applications should store their settings in ~/.appname in any format they see fit.
If I really mess up a Linux install, so that it is unrepairable, i usually just backup my files, copy and archive the .mozilla folder (and any other important configs) and do a fresh install.