Re: [gentoo-user] Argh: No KMail after KDEPIM upgrade

[Alex Schuster <wonko@wonkology.org>]

I did not intend to send this mail yet, but I accidentally did. It
happened when kwin started doing weird things again, like transparent
window titles, window content being all black or grey and such. Happens
after a few days of KDE4 sesstion uptime, the kwin proecess has grown to
some hundred megs (the record was 1.3G) then.

I wanted to close the running applications before logging out, which
somehow worked for the composing window of this mail, although it was
meant to end in the drafts folder, not here.
There was also a konqueror window which had some open tabs with threads
about this KDEPIM problem, forutunately I was able to save them, despite
the bookmark menu being all grey.

For the moment, I have disabled kmail in kontact, and grouped the
kontact window with a thunderbird window. Now the next problem is that
thunderbird does not check my IMAP folders for new mail, only the one I
am currently in. Do I fix this problem? Or better invest the time in
fixing this KDEPIM problem? Try another mail client?

None of those. Instead I install Linux Mint [*] on my Mom's notebook.

Again.

Because I just killed the existing installation. After some tweaking it
worked fine, so I thought it was time for a backup of /boot and ~/.*
files on a backup partition, which I had to create first.

Before:
/dev/sda7	10G	/root
/dev/sda8	10G	/home
free space	28G

After:
/dev/sda7	10G	/root
/dev/sda8	20G	/home
/dev/sda9	8G	/backup

resize2fs /dev/sda8 said the partition was at maximum size already, so I
rebooted. And no longer had a /home. Shouldn't this have been safe?

I removed /home from fstab so the boot process would not stop again. But
now X does not come up. And the console stays black. Somehow, eth0 is
down, but wlan0 is connected, I can log in via ssh in order to activate
the Grub menu, so I could remove the quiet option. Mint / Ubuntu does
not show a Grub menu, booting starts without delay. In Mint, even
pressing the escape key does not show the boot process, not sure how
this was in Ubunbtu. There is no fancy splash image either in Mint, so
the might be something wrong here. I wanted to activate the menu,
realized that Grub2 does things SO DIFFERENT from the Grub I know, but
then found /etc/default/grub, with lines like GRUB_HIDDEN_MENU=true or
something like that, and a comment said the update-grub command would
take care of this. I ran it, rebooted, and now I still see no menu.
Good: the boot messages are visible. Bad: they are totally distorted and
not readable, I think this is the new kernel or initrd I got installed
with update-grub. Had this before with Ubuntu when I allowed it to
install closed-source video drivers.

So I just did a fresh install, now I will configure what I already had
configured before. Then comes KDEPIM maybe, after some sleep.

	Wonko

[*] No, not Gentoo. I want a quick setup, no long compiles to keep it up
to date, and I hoped for some additional distro magic that would
automatically detect my WLAN & stuff.