Kubuntu 15.10--Post-installation problems

[wtb32141]

I have been using Kubuntu 14.04 for 20 months. Until 6 weeks ago I got internet on a landline. Then I bought a smartphone and terminated my landline. I downloaded to my PC a program called WICD Network Manager. With it I could tether my smartphone to my PC and surf the web on my PC.

Tuesday I used that tethering to download the ISO file for Kubuntu 15.10. Everything worked fine. Yesterday I installed 15.10 on my PC, which has 2 identical hard drives (A and B). The installation worked, but some post-installation problems arose.

Problem 1: My A drive has 3 partitions. Sda1 had Mepis 8; sda2 is my home directory; sda3 contains Kubuntu 14.04. The B drive is used to back up my home directory and for swap space. I told the installer to put 15.10 on sda1; to reformat sda2; and to use sdb1 as swap space. During the installation the PC was not tethered to the smartphone. From those facts, one would think that sda3 (containing Kubuntu 14.04) would emerge from 15.10’s installation in the exact same state as it was in before the installation, but it didn’t. Kubuntu 14.04 now contains a new version of Dolphin, the Firefox browser, and the Chromium browser. Why?

Problem 2: If I now boot into 14.04 and tether my phone to my PC, the PC gets the internet signal and works for about 1 minute. After that 1 minute, the phone loses its internet connection--every time. This problem is new, and it arose immediately after I installed 15.10. So I cannot now surf the net at home on my PC. That’s why I’m at the library using their public computers.

The new version of Dolphin is so different from the 14.04 version that it’s going to be days before I learn enough about the new version to feel comfortable enough to copy the backup version of my home directory from the B drive to the A drive. I wish I had not formatted sda2 during the installation of 15.10.

If you can shed any light on any of those problems, I will be grateful.

[wtb32141]

Yes, 14.04 used sda2 as my home directory, and it will be my home directory for both versions (14.04 and 15.10). Do you see any problems with that procedure?

Re 14.04's version of Dolphin. For the 20 months preceding my installation of 15.10, Dolphin (running 14.04) displayed no panels, but it and 15.10 version do now. Panels are brand new to me, and it took me a while to discover that one can add "Copy to" and "Move to" to the menu that appears when you right click on a file or folder. Those options were in that menu for the last 20 months, but they were not in the menu immediately after I installed 15.10. Version 14.10's Dolphin looks almost exactly like 15.10's Dolphin. One difference is the the 14.04 version shows the items ("Root"k, "Trash", etc.) in the first panel twice. Once should suffice. The 15.10 version of Dolphin has them only once. Where all the panel stuff came from in the 14.04 version of Dolphin is beyond me.

Now to the good news I have to report:

The 14.04 version of Dolphin recognizes my phone and enters an icon + the phone's name in Dolphin's devices panel. When I clicked on that entry I was pleasantly surprised to see the phone's various directories, which should enable me to transfer files from the phone to the PC and vice versa.

This morning, I tethered my phone to my PC after booting into 14.04, and it worked fine. After 20 minutes, I disconnected the USB cable to see if it would work again. I tried 2 more times, and I had the same problem I reported earlier; it stayed connected for about 1 minute, and then the phone lost its internet connection. But if it worked once, surely it will work again if I just figure out the combination to the lock. I suspect it's a sequencing problem. I'll play around with it some more and see if I can get it to work every time as it did for the month preceding my installation of 15.10.

Two "home" folders exist. One is "/home"; another is "/home/bb" (bb's home folder). When I transferred the backup of my "home directory" from the B drive to the A drive, I told it to put it in Home. The backup program (Lucky Backup) put its main folder (which for me was named LB--bb into the /home/bb folder, which resulted in all of my files and folders being 1 level too low. So I moved the LB--bb folder up and into /home. Then I changed bb's name to bbb. Next I changed LB--bb to bb. Result: now my home directory (/home/bb) has what it's supposed to have. This change resulted in 14.04's Chromium browser to again display the bookmarks that I had set. So I was mistaken in saying that the 14.04 partition has a new version of the Chromium browser.

I can see progress; things are moving in the right direction. Thank you very much for replying to my post.

[vinnywright]

yes ,,,,,trying to share a /home partition between installs can/will create quirks because of the differences in the config files .

I long ago quit trying to share a /home partition or even use a separate /home partition from the system install partition .

Now I just install the hole shebang to one 50GB or so partition and then replace the /home/vinny folder/Directory's (Documents Downloads dwhelper Music MyMachines Pictures steam Videos) with system links to their counter parts in a TB storage drive ,,,,,,,this way I have all my data accessible in all my OS's but the / partition of the OS dose not half to deal with the space usage of all the data ,,,and all configs stay segregated.

VINNY