Since I have been having stutters after switching from an NV to AMD GPU I have installed Manjaro on another drive and restored a backup.
Now it wont let me log in because the desktop theme is not installed, while I thought a backup plays everything back including the theme.
Anyways, I have tried to get into the console on the login screen but I could not find a way. I thought it was F2 or alt, ctrl + F2 or some other F-button, no dice.
But even if I could get into the console I would not know howto install a desktop theme from there and I also do not want to change to another because that will reset all the desktop and task manager settings (I fell for that several times already and it was a pain).
Is there a way to install a theme from the console and how would I get into it from the login screen?
It depends on what backup software you used, and what its settings are. In the event of timeshift the home directories are not included in the backup/snapshot by default.
From within a graphical session — even one that has not fully initialized yet — it’s usually CtrlAltF3.
There is no easy way of doing it from the console, because you first need to download the theme — which involves a working desktop environment and/or a working browser — and then unpack it and move the components to the right places.
Any way to set the theme to standard? I mentioned that not the main theme was changed but only the colour, plasma style and window decorations, because breeze has these ugly greyish window styles while I prefer full black.
Well, you can fetch the window decorations of your choice from store.kde.org by way of the Get New… button in the pertinent section of the window decorations, and likewise for the Plasma style.
The color scheme can be created by modifying an existing one or creating a new one from scratch.
If it is just the desktop theme and not the global theme, then the setting is contained in the ~/.config/plasmarc file. I have my system set to “Breeze”, which is Plasma’s default:
cat ~/.config/plasmarc
[Theme]
name=default
To confirm that file is the one that sets Plasma’s desktop theme, I just changed to “Breath”, and the file immediately changed to:
cat ~/.config/plasmarc
[Theme]
name=breath
So, if you can login to a TTY session, just open the file in an editor:
nano ~/.config/plasmarc
Make the change to default (Breeze) or breath, save the file: Ctrl+S (or Ctrl+X if you want a prompt first), and then see if you can now log into a Plasma GUI.
It is possible that certain files in your home directory — most notably under ~/.config and ~/.local/share — are messing things up. Likewise for hidden files directly under your home directory as well.
In the event of doubt, log in at a tty as root, rename /home/fred to /home/fred.bak, and create a new and empty /home/fred.
If you then log in at the GUI login screen again, it should start you off with a vanilla Plasma environment, and then you can try restoring things one by one from the .bak directory until you get problems, and then you’ll know what file caused the problem.
It seems you were right, it did not restore the home folder. There is no /home/fred folder. If I explicitly activate the home AND root folders to be backed up, it does not restore them both, or should I have checked the options for the home folder check before I restored it? It makes no sense to me but well…
You might want to look at using a different application for backing up your /home/ directory, as timeshift is intended more for system snapshots than user data backups. Making separate backups for /home/ will also reduce the risk of overwriting your personal files with old data if you ever have to restore a system snapshot.
I’ve been using backintime-qt for my /home/ directory backups on Plasma for quite some time with no issues encountered. It is easy to set up and runs once a day. To save space on my backup drive, I’ve set it to keep the last 10 daily backups. You can install it by running:
pamac install backintime-qt
or
sudo pacman -Syu backintime-qt
Note: as you would be using backintime-qt for your /home/ directory, make sure that you open backintime-qt as a normal user, not as root. Ignore the “Back In Time (root)” entry in Plasma’s application launcher.
The first time it seems I did not go far enough in the options to mark the home folder, but this time I did. Interestingly the result was the same. No home/fred. Path does not exist thus I cannot login.
The odd part about it is, that even if it did not copy my home folder, it should be there from the main install, which tells me that something got copied. Totally weird to me.
But there might be some issues if the target drive for the backup is not the same, since I got some error on boot - forgot what it said though. Because I wanted to go from sdb to sdc. I guess it might be better to not change the drive when restoring the root.
Thank you, that will be my next try.
You meant I should still backup the root separately with timeshift, right?
I will try and hope I will not forget that after some time.
What was really baffling me though:
When I tried to reinstall Manjaro the installer crashed. Only after I repartitioned it to ntfs the crashes stopped. That could be why I could not install cachy-os again on this drive as well (it was on there before).
Kinda odd, that a Linux installer crashes (Manjaro) or produces unrelated errors (Cachy-OS) because it is not capable of deleting or reusing already existing Linux partitions (btrfs/ext4).
The target partition is the one set in the configuration. If you change this, then of course the results will be unpredictable.
Also, if your system is spread out across multiple partitions — e.g. / and /home are on different partitions — then both of them must be mounted upon restoring the backup. If not, then everything will be restored to the root filesystem only.
The standard target partition set would be the wrong one because the backup was done from sdb but I am trying to get Manjaro on SDC working with the image from SDB, so that I can reformat SDB since it has an empty partition infront of Manjaro and I couldnt manage to merge it with the Manjaro partition.
So it is probably best if I just restore the home dir on SDC and, if that works, install the apps manually. It is only important to me that I do not lose the desktop settings, the rest will be going fast.
That way it is also more likely that I get rid of the video stutter on mouse movement that I had since I switched GPU’s.
Kinda stupid of me not to start with only the home dir. I hope it works.
One time, when I am getting to it, I have to learn howto put the home folder on a separate disk, like my data disk. That would probably make reinstalls easier.
