Empty desert after fresh install of 21.04

Dear All,

I just installed 21.04 on disk. I think something went wrong because the desktop is empty. No bars, no panels, no conky widgets anywhere, just a background photo and that’s it.

The right click menu has a ton of entries with no matching software. I have tried all the terminal entries, no one is available (rxvt, gnome-terminal, xfce-terminal, konsole, xterm). So I don’t know what happened, and I don’t know how I can troubleshoot this since I can’t even launch a terminal :frowning:

Which log files should I check ? I will dual boot from mint and see if I can find something.

Thanks for your precious help.

Which ISO you use to install?
Did you check md5 sum?

I used the ISO from sourceforge but didnt check mdsum.
my guess is rather owner pernissions on /home since I am using a pre-existing /home partition, the issue could be a uid problem.

Another problem I have is that I can no longer dual boot from mint. when i choose mint from the grub menu the screen gets dark than the computer freezes, even keyboard LEDs dont respond [caps locks, num locks have no effect]

Thats the reason. It will not work for sure.
You need a brand new /home.

Couldn’t I just edit the uid in /etc/passwd ? (by the way, I see no editors menu in the live installer).

Update : it seems the uid are the same across the two distros (1000 on both cases) (/mnt/any is mabox and /mnt/mint is linux mint)

mabox@mabox /mnt/home/ychaouche $ grep ychaouche /mnt/any/@/etc/passwd
ychaouche:x:1000:1000:yassine:/home/ychaouche:/bin/bash
mabox@mabox /mnt/home/ychaouche $ grep ychaouche /mnt/mint/etc/passwd
ychaouche:x:1000:1000:Yassine Chaouche,,,:/home/ychaouche:/bin/bash
mabox@mabox /mnt/home/ychaouche $

Why you doing that?
Whats the point to share one home directory between two completely different distributions?
And also using two totally different Desktops?

This is asking for trouble.

Home directory is not only for user files, but also store all user level configurations.
When you (or installer) creates new user - its home directory is created and all user defaults configs are copied from /etc/skel.

I shouldn’t write that… but you may try to copy all files from /etc/skel/ to home dir - including hidden files.
Even if it succed somehow you may face unexpected troubles in future.

So I strongly recommend to make a fresh installation without using old home directory.

If you really need to share data (images, movies, other files) between two different Linux systems maybe good idea is to create partition for that and mount it read-write in /opt for example.
I used that many years ago when I was distro hopping a little bit sometimes.

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Thank you for your valuable input @napcok, I appreciate it.

Having a different /home partition means loosing :

  • All my firefox bookmarks, history, stored passwords and extensions.
  • All my locally stored e-mail (thunderbird + kmail + fetchmail + notmuch)
  • All my hotkeys
  • My IRC logs on the different clients I used (xchat2, konversation)
  • My Baloo and Akonadi databases for omni-search
  • My dot files, obviously (.bashrc, .emacs)

I also think the whole point of having a separate /home partition is to allow multi-booting operating systems to access user files and share config, in addition to allow reinstalling the operating system without wiping out user data.

For the record, I had success running other distros with the same /home (ElementaryOS, Netrunner, KDE Neon).

Well thanks for the tip about /etc/skel. Indeed, copying the .config subdirectory alone has already brought me menus, sidepanels, and conky applets ? (I don’t know the terminology).

I notice the upper panel isn’t there, but I haven’t finished copying the rest of /etc/skel/ files. I’m going cautiously step by step (and making backups)