I make image backups of the operating systems I am using about once a week, using Clonezilla. This is perhaps not the best solution, but guarantees that I won't lose a lot in the event of such an occurrence. Unfortunately this advice won't help Keith with his present problem, but with wind storms as prevalent as they are at the present time, it might be useful. I also have a 10-year-old UPS and it allowed me to shut down properly during the last power failure.
Robert "Tim" Kopp http://analytic.tripod.com/ On Friday, January 6, 2023 at 12:30:08 PM PST, Keith Lofstrom <[email protected]> wrote: Thanks for good ideas about UPS ... The REASON that restoring my UPS is urgent was that an unfortunately timed power glitch left my main working desktop in a borked state. By way of background, I hate video games, so instead of gnome3 I normally use an Ubuntu-mate (gnome-2 clone) desktop. After the power glitch, my Ubuntu-mate desktop came up in a poorly configured version of gnome-3, difficult to use at the best of times and execrably awful when mis-configured. This was difficult to understand, especially with no "video game mouse skills". I could only access it by ssh from a different system. Cutting to the chase, the problem happened becuase the system was in the middle of installing autoupdates when the power glitched. The install did not complete, nor leave an understandable audit trail. When I finally managed to diagnose this yesterday evening, I found an error message flying past during boot, Failed to acquire org.gnome.SessionManager and buried before that: Could not acquire name on session bus The intertubes led me to the fix; editing /etc/X11/Xsession.d/80mate-environment then adding the line: unset DBUS_SESSION_BUS_ADDRESS before the closing "fi". My ubuntu-mate desktop (20.04) is back to working, and boots properly. But not for long; after completing some other urgent tasks (replacing the tarp that tore off the greenhouse in recent high winds, etc.) I will finish transferring my working environment to a debian-mate machine, and exile ubuntu-mate to offline backups. Perhaps a similar problem will occur with debian-mate someday, but at least I won't have a thicket of opaque, incomprehensible "snap" packages to contend with. Keith -- Keith Lofstrom [email protected]
