Revive corrupt user

[NiftyFedora Mitch]

On Fri, Sep 19, 2008 at 3:42 PM, Alan Cox <alan at lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk> wrote:
>> latest Fedora updates, I could no longer get to the desktop of my
>> personal user so in the end I had to go through the same process of
>> creating a new user before I could login. But I again had to go through
>> the tedious task of copying my personal files and personalising the
>> settings of the new user.
>
> You shouldn't be able to break the desktop that comprehensively even by
> doing silly things (well beyond using gconf-editor which is asking for
> trouble ;)). How did you manage to break it ?

Good question...

> Generally for GNOME doing an "rm -rf .gconf" is a reset of the desktop
> state and should get you back to sanity. Ditto with ".mozilla" for
> firefox.

To answer the question it might be better to
keep the bogus bits thusly...

  mv   .gconf .gconf-broken
  mv   .mozilla .mozilla-broken

Later one might inspect the "broken" bits and sort it out.

Other personal bits can be seen with "ls -al  $HOME" and "ls -ld $HOME".
Perhaps after logging in on a virtual terminal Ctrl-Alt-F1 to keep X11 out
of the game.

Since a user is broken, as root these would become "ls -al
~brokenuser" and "ls -ld ~brokenuser".


-- 
 NiftyFedora
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