On 08/04/14 19:05, Chris Walker wrote:
On Tue, 8 Apr 2014 17:36:10 +0100 Chris Walker alug_cdw@the-walker-household.co.uk wrote:
A notification has just overwritten the screen saying that the Live DVD of Mageia 4 has just finished. I'll let you know how I get on!
I ran the Live DVD and that works fine! It displays at full screen resolution with all the normal taskbar icons.
I ran one or two checks on the Live DVD. For example, I looked at what kernel stuff was installed and also graphics. It had lots of NVidia stuff in there so for me, it's not something I can easily transfer over. I also ran the same graphics test I do here and although it got further than this (faulty) one does, it didn't get to a full screen display (the bit where it says 'do you want to accept this'.
So what can I learn from that? How do I fix the mis-configuration on the machine using the Live DVD or do I bite the bullet and re-install Mageia 4 (I have to admit, that does sound the normal way to fix Windows problems!)?
Off the top of my head:
On your existing faulty system. Create a new user. reboot and log in as this user in the normal desktop environment. If the display works OK, then this means there's something wrong with your user's configuration files (Situation 1). If on the other hand the display still doesn't work, then it's more fundamental and it may be a system configuration file like the x11 config file. (Situation 2)
If it's situation 2, then I'd be tempted to backup then delete the X11 config file (assuming that it's still used in your distro), reboot and see if all works, or nearly works. I can't remember exactly what that config file is called, but ISTR that it's auto-detected nowadays anyway if missing. If it's still broken after this, I'd be tempted to format and reinstall (after backing up of course).
If it's situation 1, then I'd be tempted to do the following. Use a Live CD & mount the hard disk drive, or boot to a command prompt somehow, or an user unconnected with these steps. Assuming your normal username is "chris", and the new working username is "new" and you're not logged in as either of them, and have root privileges
rename chris's home directory - something like [NB paths will be different if you're doing this from a live CD]
mv /home/chris /home/chris.bak
copy the (good) files in the new user's home directory to a new chris home directory mkdir /home/chris cp -R /home/new/* /home/chris chown chris:chris /home/chris chown -R chris:chris /home/chris/*
Reboot and log in as chris and see if it works. If it does, copy things a bit at a time from /home/chris.bak to /home/chris I'd only copy what you need though: documents, browser shortcuts etc.
Good luck whatever you decide.
Steve