Kubuntu 12.10 does not boot past boot-splash screen after Muon Software Update.

[SteveRiley]

In this case, the screen shot doesn't provide enough information. I want to see the status of every KDE- and Kubuntu-related package that is on your computer. You might be missing a fair amount of the operating system, and I need to determine this.

I'd like you to try the technique I expressed in step #50. I'll rewrite it here.

sudo apt-get install pastebinit

dpkg -l | egrep -i 'kde|kubuntu' | pastebinit

Reply here with the URL that pastebinit puts on the screen.

[judedawson]

Hi Steve,

Attached is the screen-shot output for

sudo apt-get install pastebinit

Am working on the output for

dpkg -l | egrep -i 'kde|kubuntu' | pastebinit

Thanks.

From,
Jude

PS - you know what - from the output in the screen-shot, I don't think that pastebinit was installed...

[judedawson]

Hi Steve,

Had an idea of how I can provide you the output for

dpkg -l | egrep -i 'kde|kubuntu'

I ran the command

dpkg -l | egrep -i 'kde|kubuntu' |less

, took screen-shots of the output & verified it by comparing them to the output for

dpkg -l | egrep -i 'kde|kubuntu' |more

Please refer to attachment. Hope this helps

From,
Jude

[SteveRiley]

As I suspected...a large portion of KDE has been removed from your machine. I am, unfortunately, unable to explain why. I don't know how much longer you want to engage in the clue discovery route. The file /var/log/apt/history.log (plus any other "history" files that end with some-number.gz) would tell me what happened during an update. Feel free to post them here if you want, I'll examine them.

Do you not have Internet access with this machine currently?

[judedawson]

Hi Steve,

Thanks for the update.

Yes, I DO wish to continue with troubleshooting

I'm fortunate to have a great Kubuntu team to guide me through this & am confident that we will resolve this matter. Thanks for offering to continue guiding me on this 'journey'.

I'll do my best to post the outputs for

/var/log/apt/history.log

.

I'll also work on obtaining the outputs for the other *.gz "history" files.

Both my primary laptop (the one with the problem) and secondary laptop (the one I'm using for this correspondence) are connected to a wireless ADSL router that does both the internet connection as well as the internal WiFi. Both laptops connect to the internet via WiFi without any problems. I'll try plugging my laptop directly to the wireless-router via a physical Cat-5 connection. What command-line should I type to check & confirm if the laptop connects to the Net?

Thanks very much, again.

From,
Jude

[judedawson]

Hi Steve,

Command

/var/log/apt/history.log

outputs the following;

-bash: /var/log/apt/history.log: Permission denied

Thanks.

From,
Jude

[judedawson]

Hi Steve,

I did some troubleshooting with the internet connectivity problem. Details as follows:

1. Command

lspci

and

sudo ifconfig -a

are shown in the attached screen-shots 1 & 2 respectively.

2. Commands:

/etc/network/interfaces
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/nsswitch/conf

all show the same output:

-bash: <command>: Permission denied

is shown in screen-shot3.

The result is the same even though I am logged in as root.

What's going on here

Thanks.

From,
Jude

[vinnywright]

2. Commands:

/etc/network/interfaces
/etc/resolv.conf
/etc/nsswitch/conf

all show the same output:

-bash: <command>: Permission denied

is shown in screen-shot3.

The result is the same even though I am logged in as root.

What's going on here

Thanks.

From,
Jude

those are not commands they are the paths to config files ,, you need to view them with somthing.

if in a terminal you can do this with "cat"

vinny@Vinnys-HP-G62:~$ cat /etc/network/interfaces
auto lo
iface lo inet loopback

see

VINNY

[SteveRiley]

Thanks, Vinny. Jude, I haven't forgottten about you...I've been unusually busy the last couple days. I'm just about to leave the office and catch the bus home, then I've got symphony practice this evening. Later tonight I'll try to make some time for you.

[judedawson]

Hi Vinny,

Ohhhhhhhh......I see.....<feeling rather embarrassed now :P>

Is the

cat

command the same as tying in

nano

followed by the path name?

Thanks.

From,
Jude

[judedawson]

Hi Vinny,
I'll repeat the steps in Item#68 with the correct prefix & post the results later tonight (am late for work...)

Hi Steve,
Thanks for your continued follow up with me Am eager to get to the bottom of this...
Symphony practice - wow....what instrument do you play?

I really appreciate your help on this, guys

Off to work now...

From,
Jude

[vinnywright]

Hi Vinny,

Ohhhhhhhh......I see.....<feeling rather embarrassed now :P>

Is the

cat

command the same as tying in

nano

followed by the path name?

Thanks.

From,
Jude

no ....cat will just display the content of a file on the command line (it will do more/other things ) nano is a command line text editor and you could change/modify the files with it , cat will not used in this context .

VINNY

[SteveRiley]

Let's detour for a moment into a brief command line tutorial.

When working at the CLI, the first thing you type (in most cases) is the name of some command. Following that, you typically supply parameters. Parameters may be options (sometimes called switches), which control various aspects of the command's behavior. Other parameters may include names of files, which would be files that you want to do something with, or that supply additional information to the command.

My statement "The file /var/log/apt/history.log (plus any other 'history' files that end with some-number.gz) would tell me what happened during an update," means I need to see the contents of those files. When you're sitting at the command prompt and you type just the file name, as you attempted, the parser interprets your entry as the name of the command you wish to run. But /var/log/apt/history.log isn't a command, so the shell throws an error message.

Vinny mentioned what you need to do. One of the several command that instruct the shell to display the contents of a file is cat. To display the file in question, you'd type

cat /var/log/apt/history.log

and the output would be the line-by-line display of that file's contents.

Advising folks in forums such as KFN means that we're dealing with wide varieties of experiences. Often, we take a guess at someone's experience level; sometimes those guesses are right, sometimes they aren't. But now that you've been introduced to cat, I can write "show us the contents of /path/to/foo.bar without actually spelling out the command for you

Moving on. I also wrote that I'd be interested in files whose names end with some-number.gz. That request contains a small flurry of assumptions, to be honest. To fully understand it, you'd need to divine the fact that those files are in the same subdirectory as the earlier file in question -- namely, /var/log/apt. You'd also need to intuit why some-number is italicized. Typcially, it's a clue that you wouldn't actually type "some-number" but instead make a substitution, using an appropriate number. Furthermore, you'd need to know that you can't simply cat a file ending in .gz, because such files are compressed with GZip to save space. To display the contents of a GZipped file, the command is zcat.

How, then, to actually carry out the request? First you need to obtain a list of all files in the subdirectory under consideration. ls lists contents of directories. Continuing in the context of this particular exercise, the command to do that is:

ls -al /var/log/apt

This variation of the command includes both an option, -al (display all files including hidden ones), and the subdirectory of interest.

Here's mine:

steve@x1:~$ [B]ls -al /var/log/apt[/B]
total 80
drwxr-xr-x  2 root root  4096 Feb  1 08:16 .
drwxr-xr-x 15 root root  4096 Feb  6 23:25 ..
-rw-r--r--  1 root root     0 Feb  1 08:16 history.log
-rw-r--r--  1 root root 32461 Jan 31 22:04 history.log.1.gz
-rw-r-----  1 root adm      0 Feb  1 08:16 term.log
-rw-r-----  1 root adm  39788 Jan 31 22:04 term.log.1.gz

In Ubuntu and its flavors, log files periodically roll over into GZipped archives. Notice how my history.log was rolled into a GZip archive, and that subsequently I haven't yet done any updates (thus the file size for the current log is zero). To see what's in that GZipped archive, I'd type:

zcat /var/log/apt/history.log.1.gz

Sometimes you'll see people on the forum here indicate ll (that's two lower-case letter "ell"s) in place of ls -al. Ubuntu creates a command alias for that. Aliases are mechanisms for substituting alternate shorter commands for a longer ones.

Now, let's resume working on your problem.

[SteveRiley]

Screenshot 2 from post #67 tells me a few important things. Neither eth0 (your Ethernet connection) nor wlan0 (your wireless connection) are functioning, They have no assigned IP addresses and both their transmit and receive queues have processed no traffic.

I have a reasonably high degree of confidence we can fix your system, but you will need to get network connectivity working. Let's eliminate variables and connect your laptop's Ethernet directly to your router. To verify connectivity, you could try a variety of things. I'll provide some examples, using the outputs provided by my computer, and I'll highlight the interesting bits in blue.

Check that network interfaces are fully configured. In my case, that's the wireless:

steve@x1:~$ [B]ifconfig[/B]
eth0      Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr f0:de:f1:a5:aa:41  
          UP BROADCAST MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:0 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          RX bytes:0 (0.0 B)  TX bytes:0 (0.0 B)
          Interrupt:20 Memory:f2600000-f2620000 

lo        Link encap:Local Loopback  
          inet addr:127.0.0.1  Mask:255.0.0.0
          inet6 addr: ::1/128 Scope:Host
          UP LOOPBACK RUNNING  MTU:65536  Metric:1
          RX packets:360 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:360 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:0 
          RX bytes:42471 (42.4 KB)  TX bytes:42471 (42.4 KB)

wlan0     Link encap:Ethernet  HWaddr 08:11:96:c4:70:b0  
          [COLOR="#0000CD"]inet addr:192.168.0.224  Bcast:192.168.0.255  Mask:255.255.255.0[/COLOR]
          inet6 addr: fe80::a11:96ff:fec4:70b0/64 Scope:Link
          UP BROADCAST [COLOR="#0000CD"]RUNNING[/COLOR] MULTICAST  MTU:1500  Metric:1
          RX packets:41571 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 frame:0
          TX packets:21568 errors:0 dropped:0 overruns:0 carrier:0
          collisions:0 txqueuelen:1000 
          [COLOR="#0000CD"]RX bytes:57559794 (57.5 MB)  TX bytes:2484179 (2.4 MB)[/COLOR]

Check your routing table, and ensure that your default route (the destination 0.0.0.0) points to the IP address of your wireless router:

steve@x1:~$ [B]route -n -ee[/B]
Kernel IP routing table
Destination     Gateway         Genmask         Flags Metric Ref    Use Iface    MSS   Window irtt
[COLOR="#0000CD"]0.0.0.0         192.168.0.1[/COLOR]     0.0.0.0         UG    0      0        0 wlan0    0     0      0
192.168.0.0     0.0.0.0         255.255.255.0   U     9      0        0 wlan0    0     0      0

Ensure name resolution is configured correctly. First, /etc/resolv.conf should point to a dynamically-generated file:

steve@x1:~$ [B]ll /etc/resolv.conf[/B]
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root 29 Jan 11 21:55 /etc/resolv.conf -> ../run/resolvconf/resolv.conf

Then examine that dynamic file:

steve@x1:~$ [B]cat /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf[/B]
# Dynamic resolv.conf(5) file for glibc resolver(3) generated by resolvconf(8)
#     DO NOT EDIT THIS FILE BY HAND -- YOUR CHANGES WILL BE OVERWRITTEN
nameserver 127.0.1.1
search rileyz.local

(I run my own local DNS and internal domain; your dynamic file will probably be different.)

Finally, see you can send and receive Internet traffic. Ping Verizon's primary DNS server, always a reliable destination to use for troubleshooting connectivity:

steve@x1:~$ [B]ping 4.2.2.1[/B]
PING 4.2.2.1 (4.2.2.1) 56(84) bytes of data.
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_req=1 ttl=57 time=35.5 ms
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_req=2 ttl=57 time=38.1 ms
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_req=3 ttl=57 time=28.6 ms
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_req=4 ttl=57 time=39.5 ms
64 bytes from 4.2.2.1: icmp_req=5 ttl=57 time=30.9 ms
[B]^C[/B]
--- 4.2.2.1 ping statistics ---
5 packets transmitted, 5 received, 0% packet loss, time 4006ms
rtt min/avg/max/mdev = 28.693/34.584/39.531/4.147 ms

Press Ctrl+C to stop the pinging.

Once we ensure you have a working Internet connection, we can commence with system repair.

[judedawson]

Hi Steve & Vinny,

Thanks for the explanation & clarification - I understand better now

Apologies for the delayed response - the internet connection here was REALLY slow last night.

I connected my laptop directly to the router via CAT-5 & I've got the screen-shots of the outputs of commands in the attached PDF as per Item #74.

1. Output for command

ifconfig

is shown in the attached screen-shot1.

2. Outputs for commands

route -n -ee
ll /etc/resolv.conf
cat /run/resolvconf/resolv.conf

are shown in the attached screen-shot2.

3. Output for command

ping 4.2.2.1

is shown in the attached screen-shot3.


Good day, all.

From,
Jude