[SOLVED]no home folder

[houndhen]

I have tried to install Kubuntu 7.10 several times recently on my multiboot system. It is 3.00 gigahertz Intel Core2 Duo w/250gb HD that is already partitioned. I was attempting to re-use 3 partitions that had another distro. 2 Gb Swap, 10gb Root, and 40gb Home. During the installation I edit all three again and tell the install to format the root partition. When the install gets to around 83% I get an notification something about security files couldn't be updated or something similiar. Then after clicking on OK the installation completes and says that I need to re-boot. Upon re-boot the gui login gives me an error that says "could not start kstartupconfig. Check installation" and then another message about "call to lnusertemp failed (temporary directories full?). check installation"

Upon searching for kstartupconfig I found a post about editing the startupconfig file that is found at /home/user/.kde/share/config/. When I tried to do this from another distro after mounting the root partition of the kubuntu installation there didn't seem to be a home directory.

I was trying to install 7.10 and working with it to learn something about kubuntu while waiting on 8.04 to be available. I plan to try and install 8.04 over the top of 7.10 when I get it.

I checked the cd from the menu of the live cd and it was ok.

I posted this once and abandoned it but this is preying on my mind. Other people are obviously installing this distro. I want to learn more about Linux and Kubuntu in particular. Is there something that I need to do besides wait on 8.04? What if I have the same problems with 8.04?

Thanks

[Fintan]

Re: no home folder

I have not seen this before but if you boot into recovery and set your user to the /home partition you should be okay. Conversely I have been using 8.04 since alpha and find it very stable since beta. So you might just think about installing 8.04 instaed. If you have a user folder in /home for kubuntu just delete its contents.

If you really want to install 7.10 first then I would suggest using the alternate cd instead of the live cd.

I hope this points you into the right direction and welcome (almost) to the party

[houndhen]

Re: no home folder

Thanks, Fintan. I think that I will try the 8.04 beta. I had tried Shift Linux which was actually 8.04 kubuntu but my live cd was bad so it didn't install correctly either. I will download the iso for Kubuntu this time.

[houndhen]

Re: no home folder

Well, I just thought that my problem was solved.

I downloaded the kubuntu 8.04 iso and burned the cd. The md5sum checked and so did the cd verification menu item on the live cd. I downloaded the alternative 386 iso.

Upon installation everything went fine except grub failed to install. That was not a problem since I can boot another distro and mount that drive and get the details of the boot folder.

Well, after editing the grub/menu.lst that to include the details of the kubuntu boot folder kernel and image files I thought that I was set.

When I got to the login screen everything went fine until I entered my login name and password and hit enter key. I got the same errors that I stated in my original post that started this thread. (kstartupconfig)

This is really frustrating. I haven't looked to see if there is actually a home directory or my user folder. My system is only months old. I am running Mepis 7.0, Mint 4.0, and PCLOS 2007 on this same system. If I can boot into them why is it nearly impossible to get a ubuntu distro to boot.

Any ideas would be most welcome.

[Fintan]

Re: no home folder

Is /home on a separate partition? If so is it large enough?

[houndhen]

Re: no home folder

Yes, /home is a separate partition. When I installed the only partition that I formated was the / partition. I am wondering if I should try again and have the installer format the /home partition as well.

I looked and there is a home folder on the root partition.

I think I will re-install and format the / and /home partitions. I looked at the startupconfig file and it is left over from another installation it seems. I will post back the results.

**********************************************edit line*************
Well it worked. I should have been reformatting the /home partition all this time and would have saved myself and others some consternation. Hooray!! I am in Kubuntu 8.04 and using it right now.

Thanks to everyone and their input. Will mark this thread solved again.
houndhen

[Qqmike]

Re: [SOLVED]no home folder

That's very good and interesting feedback, houndhen. (Should be useful to others.) Thanks for that, and glad you (& Fintan) solved this.

[Fintan]

Re: [SOLVED]no home folder

I am glad it worked but am still a bit skeptical:

Well it worked. I should have been reformatting the /home partition all this time and would have saved myself and others some consternation. Hooray!! I am in Kubuntu 8.04 and using it right now.

If I had to do that I would be deleting all of my users as well which is not the logic behind a separate /home. Did you choose (activate) the /home partition upon the first (non-formating / home install)?

You can do this without formating

If not then that would have been the problem.

anyway welcome to the party

[Qqmike]

Re: [SOLVED]no home folder

Good point, Fintan.
(and actually, I didn't read this thread carefully enough ... )

[houndhen]

Re: [SOLVED]no home folder

This might help, Fintan.

On this box I have Windows XP, Linux Mint, PCLOS 2007, Mepis 7.0, and now a working Kubuntu 8.04.

I have 4 of each - swap, root, home partitions. I looked into trying to change to only one home partition and decided not to go back and re-do everything. When I was researching setting up only one home partition some of the posts that I found indicated that there could be problems between different distros. As a newbie, I didn't want to start something that would have potential problems when what I had was working.

Anyway, post back if I am not clear in explaining this. Thanks again.

[dibl]

Re: [SOLVED]no home folder

I looked into trying to change to only one home partition

That's a bad idea -- each desktop/environment will save its user settings in the /home/user partition, and they'll soon be very confused by each other. It's better to have a separate "DATA" partition, and then make a symlink into small /home* partitions in each OS filesystem.

However, you could eliminate 3 of the swap spaces and let the one remaining swap space be used by whatever OS you are booting.

* Caveat: VMWare VMs appear to have a designed-in preference to be located in your /home directory -- at least that's my experience. So, you might need to make allowance for that when sizing your filesystem partition (i.e. if you have a 10GB Windows VM that needs to go in /home, add that to the basic 6GB Linux filesystem and put the entire filesystem on a 16GB partition).

[Fintan]

Re: [SOLVED]no home folder

This is not solved

and my what a fun setup

don't worry I have gone through much worse and you will be happy afterwords for helping others help themselves

To make it simple:
1 swap 1GIG is enough unless you are running 4 linuxes at once which is very doubtful

Clusterserver maybe ?

Dible is right, it is a bit late in the game to start fooling around with merging different home partitions.
What you can, and only if you have a bit of... and want a clean system, do is:

Backup all of your other user folders (mepis, etc) to wherever you have space (Kubuntu /home).

Merge the /home partitions into one /home as large as you need it where all your users feel happily at "home" and yes a /Data partition would be great for data sharing
Gparted live comes to mind.

Replace your backed up users into the new /home and point all of your fstabs to that home.

Do this as root from mepis 7.0 or HH in recovery mode.

I am really welcoming you the party