Look no further than $HOME/.local/share/gvfs-metadata/home*

I assume Mate (being a fork of Gnome2) has somewhere similar. GNOME3? No idea.

Then I logged in and…

…wait, what’s that? XDG Base Directories?

OK, so, we all know and love (hate?) our ~/Desktop, ~/Downloads, ~/Templates, ~/Public, ~/Documents, ~/Music, ~/Pictures, ~/Videos directories, right? Well, they’re defined as a freedesktop standard (see here: http://standards.freedesktop.org/basedir-spec/basedir-spec-latest.html ), and are configured locally at: ~/.config/user-dirs.dirs

So prior to logging in to X, I had three of those eight already, since they had actual content from my backups – ie, were worth restoring already. They were: ~/Desktop, ~/Public,  and ~/Videos

After logging in, I naturally gained the other 5.

But what else got pushed into $HOME? Luckily for posterity, I saved a file list both before and after. So, for no more than a simple login to X, and run a few apps (discounting internal configuration tools, I think I’ve really only run gnome-terminal, firefox, thunderbird, chromium and libreoffice so far), I have these files/directories extra…

• .adobe
• .config
• .dbus
• .dmrc
• .esd_auth
• .face
• .gconfd
• .gksu.lock
• .gnome2
• .gnome2_private
• .gstreamer-0.10
• .gvfs
• .ICEauthority
• .icons
• .libreoffice
• .linuxmint
• .local
• .macromedia
• .mozilla
• .nautilus
• .pekwm
• .pki
• .themes
• .thumbnails
• .thunderbird
• .Xauthority
• .xsession-errors

So, there is a list I only expect to grow (but not to track) over time, and it’s entirely possible I’ve missed some (I’ve certainly skipped a few I know I added manually (.fonts, .fontconfig) since I don’t know if they’d have been automatically added or not.

Anyway, the upshot of all this? Hello cruft!

0. get pekwm (package, compile from source, whatever). duh.

1. tell gnome2 to use it. ie, set ‘pekwm’ in /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager via gconf-editor or equivalent.

2. Discover that gnome2 still doesn’t pick it up, and get an error in .xsession-errors like this:

gnome-session[2010]: WARNING: Unable to find provider 'pekwm' of required component 'windowmanager'

Solve by creating $HOME/.config/autostart/pekwm.desktop with the following (or similar)…

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Exec=/usr/local/bin/pekwm
Hidden=false
X-GNOME-Autostart-enabled=true
Name[en_AU]=Window Manager
Name=Window Manager
Comment[en_AU]=our windowmanager
Comment=our windowmanager

3. Make sure your own pekwm configuration is in $HOME/.pekwm too

note: at work I have this setup, but against ‘mate’. Thus: /desktop/mate/session/required_components/windowmanager, and /usr/share/applications/pekwm.desktop with content of:

[Desktop Entry]
Type=Application
Name=pekwm
Exec=pekwm
NoDisplay=true
# name of loadable control center module
X-MATE-WMSettingsModule=pekwm
# name we put on the WM spec check window
X-MATE-WMName=Pekwm
# back compat only
X-MateWMSettingsLibrary=pekwm
X-MATE-Autostart-Phase=WindowManager
X-MATE-Provides=windowmanager
X-MATE-Autostart-Notify=true

No, I don’t know how I got either of those pekwm.desktop files. I think with mate, I copied a different one, and tuned to pekwm. With my newer (oddly) gnome2 setup, it magiced in somehow when I was testing with a test account…

My setup is… gnome2 (thanks linuxmint, debian edition) with pekwm as the windowmanager (that’s /desktop/gnome/session/required_components/windowmanager to you, gconftool), and xcompmgr to give me nifty compositing and real shadows on menus (so far, I’m toying with “xcompmgr -c -r 8 -l 1 -t 1 -o 0.6 -f -D 0.01 -I 0.1 -O 0.1″ 

It’ll be nice to have my real $HOME as the foundation of my desktop again!

home server

Disk failures (Dec23) which led to a new disk, and rebuild. Ongoing issues led to cannibalisation of my home desktop to provide parts (case/mobo/cpu/ram) and reinstall the server from scratch. I still am getting issues if I push the drives too hard, but is now usable for my home server use.

home desktop

…was cannibalised for the server, and so I started using my iMac for desktop use…

iMac

Stopped returning from sleep mode reliably (would instead power up all fans to max without giving me monitor) for a few days before then failing to power up properly at all. (no power chime, disk activity or monitor,  but I’d get the power LED pulsing, and after a minute or so, fans at full speed…

so I decided it was time to build a new desktop!

new home desktop

Using the case from the server, I bought a new mobo/cpu/ram/SSD HD combo. However, the mobo does not recognise my PCI-E video card (power to the PCI-E slot on a microATX?) … so until that is resolved a little better, it’s sitting awaiting attention.

I can, in theory, use the onboard video, but then I have a shiny external card (with its own RAM) that goes unused…

iPhones

Yeah, seriously, my phone(s) gets to play too.

Vodafone offered me a new phone at a great deal, and I accepted. They sent it through along with the new SIM it needs. I got it, but the SIM wasn’t in the package. I went to the vodafone shop, and they gave me a new SIM and activated it for me… uh oh

This made my old phone not work, and I’m not wanting to use the new phone till I can backup the current state of the old phone, and then restore it to the new one. But I can’t do that, because iMac.

Technically, the new phone works and gets on the network – and I could start using it.

…But I suspect that if I do that (eg, receive SMSs), then I have a discontinuity of use between the old one and the new one that will cause issues later on. ie, when I eventually backup the old and restore it to the new, then I’ll lose any history in my ‘new’ use. I’d rather a clean changeover (and I do not want to use “someone else’s computer” (aka: iCloud) for this), so until I have a functioning and up-to-date iTunes, I can’t use my new phone, and the activated SIM means I can’t use my old phone either…

Powerbook G4

So, I pull out my old Powerbook G4, which has a broken Ubuntu install on it. One OSX disk later, and it’s back to a clean Tiger install. But research suggests that for the iPhone 4s, I need the latest iTunes, and that it will only run on Leopard. Leopard will run on the G4, I just need a install disk. The one I have wasn’t liked by the Powerbook’s combo drive (as I recall), but I decide to test it anyway…

Putting the disk into the drive = system crash!

The disk didn’t even spin up before the system crashed totally, and now nothing will eject the disk (not even open firmware), and the system profiler says that I no longer have an optical drive attached (maybe something in hardware died, and that would explain the crash)

So…

tl;dr

• server: been rebuilt, is OK if I don’t stress the filesystems…
• linux desktop: been rebuilt, I can proceed forward if I use the onboard video… and if nothing else goes wrong…
• iMac desktop: power issues of some form, so goodbye iTunes there…
• iPhone 3Gs: old one has a deactivated SIM, but I can’t back it up without iTunes somewhere…
• iPhone 4s: works, but I’m unwilling to start using it until I can restore contacts, SMS, etc, from the old one, and so have a clean changeover.
• Powerbook laptop: optical drive failure, so cannot get a Leopard install to get iTunes…

PS: I had a windows desktop machine too… it blew a power supply a couple of months ago, so hasn’t been included in this 6 weeks of hell summary

Next step?

Well, I have been saying for a while that I need a new media center/HTPC, and I wasn’t thinking about building up something from scratch… sometime later this year.  I’ve also thought for a while that for my occasional Mac usage, moving to an Intel Mac was likely to happen, though I’d not seen any great need as yet. But now I’m toying with the idea of killing two birds with one stone, and buying a mac mini. It’ll run xmbc/boxee, and also solve my iTunes dilemma. It wont be a third monitor in my computer room any more, but I guess I can deal with that…

[12] deliberately non-plural

I was intending on building up my zsh(1) and mutt(1) configs before tackling the rebuild of my desktop –  the original catalyst of the idea.

But since I was rebuilding my account from across a nearby spare account, I thought I’d use it to take a peek at gnome3 and Unity, and so did “apt-get dist-upgrade” my Ubuntu 11.04 install.

…

A broken update later, I figured I’d install from scratch, and have gotten distracted these last few days with exploring XFCE, LXDE, Unity, Gnome3 and KDE. I’m testing them in a spare account, so as to not clutter up my main $HOME with cruft too quickly while I learn the ropes.

I gotto say, KDE has grown on me. I think its interface is a horrible hodgepodge when it comes to usability – especially out-of-the-box usability, but behind the stab-your-eyes-out bling, it’s really quite feature rich, and I’m all but thinking I’ll be moving to it. The real question for me is how many of my existing gnome-ish apps do I bring with me (eg: rhythmbox, pidgin), and how many will I adopt the KDE equivalents (konsole probably, dolphin…

Assuming I *do* go with KDE, mind you…

Like I said, KDE has grown on me, but I’m not quite sure yet if it’s a beauty spot, or merely a wart. (or indeed, a tumor. Itz not a toomaaaa!!

Interesting times indeed… full reviews will come later? =)

The first thing to do with a new clean (empty) $HOME, is to populate it with my actual files. Not the configuration cruft that is of concern, but my actual “stuff”.

For my own use, these consist of a variety of directories that are a mix of traditional unix system style directory names (eg: etc, lib, var, bin, public_html, Maildir, sin (for tempting tmp files) – with expected purposes, and more modern GUI styled names (eg: Photos, Videos, Public, Desktop), as well as a few of my own naming (verb, ketchup (for sauce src files )

Restoring these has largely been a matter of a paranoid comparison between my old recovered $HOME and the last nightly backup (I now have many ~/*/.md5sums files!)

In many cases both versions of a directory were the same, so restore was easy. In a few cases, they were different and a series of `diff -r` between the backup and recovered directories clarified that the changes were only new files, not the corruption of old ones.

Without too much difficulty, some 218 of the 221gig of my original $HOME was restored.

Regarding dotfiles… I moved a few over quickly – .ssh .cliverc and .tmux.conf for example (the latter two moving into ~/etc with symlinks), and a few others were created in opening usages (.selected_editor, .lesshst, .cache

Once I start using a GUI again, the dotfile population will explode. I hope I have a greater measure of sanity before then.

Coming soon: shell and email configurations…

• I’m a bit of a hoarder …arguably more than a “bit”, actually.

Combine these two points, and I can point to dotfiles in my $HOME directory that date back over a decade. In fact, the oldest four date to 2001…

How has this come about? Well, as I’ve upgraded machines over the years, I’ve carried my $HOME with me. After all, it has my stuff in it!  Including my customisations. The .bash_profile (2001) for instance, contains the last iteration of my bash prompt before I moved to zsh. (my current zsh prompt can trace it’s derivation through bash in 2001, all the way back to a 4DOS prompt configuration that I set up around 1994. For the record, I’ve searched for my old 4DOS configurations, but failed to find them.)

I have dotfiles from obscure chat programs that I no longer use (.goofeypw – 2002), from apps I’ve forgotten I ever used (.coldsyncrc – 2003), apps I’ve long avoided using (.lynxrc – 2005), and so on. In some cases they’re newer files from a utility I still use, but which has changed where it keeps it’s dotfile data:

-rw-r--r-- 23 nemo 24576 Oct  6  2009 .clivecache
-rw-r--r-- 23 nemo    43 Oct  6  2009 .clivelast

-rw-r--r-- 2 nemo 364544 Dec 19 22:16 .cache/clive/cache
-rw-r--r-- 2 nemo     26 Dec 19 22:17 .cache/clive/last

Worst though, is that some of this dotfile cruft causes issues with current apps, since they sometimes attempt to maintain backwards compatibility with older configurations. Notably, I once had competing flash plugins in firefox – which had the effect that one flash-video based website would refuse to play videos and tell me I had to upgrade to flash 9, whilst about:plugins would happily announce that I HAD flash9. From memory, it was fixed when I found and removed an old flash8 .so that I found sitting in ~/.netscape. Ouch! Other similar oddities have crept into my Gnome2 configuration also, but have as yet resisted resolution.

All of this has driven me to ask…

Am considering a complete $HOME dotfile cruft purge. Reconfigure from scratch all but vitals (eg: .ssh) Anyone else done this? !lazyweb
— @nemo / identi.ca – July 2011

…and in doing so, to also clear my dotfile cruft – only importing what I need, and taking the effort to clean up the configuration of apps which have spaghetti conf files. (mutt, I’m looking at you especially!)

This is my $HOME. There are many like it, but this one is mine.

…and I’m rebuilding it.

This is my story.