Re: serious problem--help

[Telsa Gwynne <hobbit aloss ukuu org uk>]

[Reformatted slightly]

> > From: Rob Smith [mailto:robsmith@hfx.eastlink.ca]
> > To: redhat-list@redhat.com; nslug@nslug.ca; gnome-list@gnome.org
> > Subject: serious problem--help

I suspect redhat-list was the better of those places to send it.
This isn't really GNOME's fault. But hey :)

> > I had a problem were I had to hit reset on the box (I now 
> > that is bad to start)

It's not great :)

> > When rebooting filesystem failed so i had to run fsck.  It 
> > seemed to fix a lot of things (like 100 or more)  Then I 
> > rebooted and when I logged in it said "no /root directory"

Sounds like you had a narrow miss losing files. 

> > and bash$ came up.  I tried to start x but it said couldn't 
> > find  root directory.  So trying to be creative I did  "mkdir 
> > /root"  that allowed me into X.  All of my programs are still 
> > there but they are acting as if I am running them for the first 
> > time...can someone explain what happened or even better
> > how to fix it??

On Mon, Aug 07, 2000 at 08:30:41AM -0400 or thereabouts, Poletti, Don wrote:
 
> It sounds like you run as root all the time. That is you
> first and biggest mistake. It caused some of the problems your 
> having. I suspect there is no fix for your current situation as 
> files have been deleted by your actions. If the worst you got 
> was losing your preferences you got off easy.

Much as I agree that running as root routinely is bad, I'm not
sure you can attribute much of this to doing so. He said, "I had
to hit reset on the box". You can do this without being root :)

> 1) DO NOT RUN AS ROOT.
> 2) if you must run as root to fix something try not to run X
> 3) If you system locks up try hitting SHIFT-CTRL-F2 to get to 
> another screen so you can kill X. (assuming you could not shut down
> another way).

Alt-control-F2 :) Yes, this is a handy thing to know exists.
Alt-control-Fsomething will get you to a virtual console where
you can start 'top', get the process number of X, and kill it
through 'k' and then the process number. It's actually more
useful to shoot random apps in X to see which one caused X to
hang, I think, but when every key-press is taking a minute to
register you get bored of that :)

It is possible that there may be files remaining in a 
/lost+found directory, I believe. I always forget about this
and have never had to restore them from there. 

As to what happened: the reason your GNOME apps are behaving
as if you're running them for the first time is that the GNOME
configuration files for each user are kept in the home
directory of that user in the sub-directory .gnome/. (You 
have to do 'ls -a' to see the files and directories beginning
with a dot.) If root's home directory (which is what /root is)
went away, then the contents couldn't be put back in. If you
are lucky, you may find some of them in a lost+found file 
somewhere. It's more likely that you simply lost them all.

So GNOME went, "Ooh, no .gnome directory? I'll make the normal
one". As you changed things back to your liking, it saved things
into that directory. 

Telsa