Here is one of those mails from someone who thought that they knew what they were doing and ruined their system!Ouch.
I was trying to get KDE sound to work and in the process of Anthony Puglisi's valiant advice I had tried to rebuild kde-extra-sounds but kept running into "incorrect checksum" errors. At each I would delete the old file and download agin. Apparently, since I had installed kde3.3 via apt-get, fink thought all the checksums were incorrect (and perhaps they were but choosing "use existing file" didn't work and the rebuild would quit. After some frustration I had decided that I'd remove all of kde and reinstall from the binary with apt-get and forget sound. I tried to use Alexander's command "rm -rf ~/.kderc ~/.kde". But copy and paste was returning nothing in Terminal so, like a complete idiot I typed in the command and put a space in after ~/ and, of course, I began removing all of my files in that directory!! I quit terminal as soon as I could but still managed to screw things up seriously. I restored as much as I could from backup but apparently many hidden files were deleted in ~/ directory.
I now have a sort of functioning system and some Xwindows functionality but Gome launches with a "can't find settings daemon" error and a minimal desktop. I cannot launch Gimp or many other gnome apps and no kde apps (I got the "DCOPServer error" again and even starting it before launching a KDE app doesn't help, nor did it before I screwed things up with my attempt at getting sound for KDE).
Luckily, I think, all of my other files are intact and /sw never got touched so I have all of the .bin files. I have checked Fink w/ Commander and all of the same packages show up with the same status. I have rebuilt bundle-gnome, gnome-desktop and gnome-core but no change. Several packages won't rebuild or reinstall running into missing "libfreetype.la" errors among others.
My question is whether or not there is a saint out there that has a since of what I've done and where to start. Some of my thoughts are "fink update-all" (an enormous time commitment) or finding out, somehow, what files are missing and reinstalling those. I don't know really where to begin. I should mention that I also now have "Help" issues, particularly around Mac Help. Help seems to work for many other apps in OSX.
Of course I have read over and over about the rm command but I thought that I was savey enough- not the case!! My backup does not have hidden files, apparently, so I am stuck. Another though was to do a Software Restore and deal with that whole pain, abandon Fink, install YellowDogLinux and vow never try to use the command line again! Unfortunately I like the Unix/Linux apps on the Mac desktop and dual booting doesn't thrill me but if I can't somehow restore 2 years of Fink work I'll consider it as I cannot imagine starting all over, assuming that I could even get all the packages reinstalled.
Thanks to anyone out there and I vow never to use rm again!!
Brian
The "can't find settings daemon" error may be unrelated to anything--I get those errors myself.
Actually, what might be the best option for you is to run
ls -a ~
which will list all of your hidden files/directories, and then rename them, e.g
mv .gimprc old.gimprc
or something similar.
What's supposed to go on is that your applications are supposed to create the hidden files/folders thay need for you automatically if they're absent--don't worry about doing any rebuilding or reinstallation of the packages since Fink doesn't put anything in your home directory.
You may have a partial set of such files/folders, which would result in an application not realizing that it needs to create something.
(the above doesn't apply in some cases, like .xinitrc, where you have to create the file yourself)
--Alexander Hansen
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