Overstretched IT support

Fri, 23 Feb 2024 00:00:00 +0000

The problem: Crash during boot

More than a year ago, a few weeks after receiving my new work computer, it failed to reboot after a system update and got stuck early in the boot process. I soon realised I could still start the computer using “safe mode”. Strangely, nothing seems to be wrong because when I manually exit safe mode at the end of the boot process, the computer works fine. Our IT department has tried to fix the problem many times without success. I even had to work without a computer for about 3 weeks while it was “under repair”. You probably know how much work you can get done without a computer: close to zero.My computer runs Cubbli 20.04.06LTS, an unofficial Ubuntu spin maintained by the University of Helsinki for internal use. Although you can do bioinformatics on a Windows or macOS computer, Linux is hands-down the first choice. Many bioinformatics developers don’t even bother to release their software for Windows. MacOS works mostly fine (since it is also UNIX-compliant OS), but I would have to pay twice the price for the same calculating power.The computer is a Lenovo P350 with an NVIDIA T1000 graphics card, which I use to address two screens. I mainly need the graphics card for 3D modelling, phylogenetics analysis and similar tasks. This graphics card may have caused the trouble. I initially did not want to buy this model, but since there was a shortage of graphic cards at the time, IT convinced me to swap out my original choice against the T1000.

Quanta crashes during start-up (moving my account to a new user)

Thu, 05 Apr 2007 00:00:00 +0000

When I start Quanta as a regular user, it crashes. The output of the terminal is: jeltsch@michael-laptop:~> quanta QGDict::hashKeyString: Invalid null key Invalid entry (missing '=') at /opt/kde3/share/apps/quanta/doc/javascript.docrc:241 TagAction::property( "accel" ) failed: property invalid or does not exist TagAction::property( "accel" ) failed: property invalid or does not exist TagAction::property( "accel" ) failed: property invalid or does not exist jeltsch@michael-laptop:~> However, when started as root, things work OK, although the error messages are the same. At the moment I changed the desktop entry from the start menu so that Quanta starts up as root. Of course, I have to allow access to my X windows, e.g. by executing xhost +. I created a new regular user (mjeltsch9 and executed quanta as mjeltsch, quanta worked also fine. Apparently something is fishy with some user-specific settings. I tried to figure out what, but to no avail. Therefore I decided to make a clean start. As root, I chowned recursively all files in my home directory to mjeltsch and moved them (excluding hidden files) into /home/mjeltsch. All hidden files I put into a new directory which I called old_dot_files. I might need some of these. Then I deleted my /home/jeltsch. Using Yast2, I deleted account “jeltsch” and changed the /home/mjeltsch into /home/jeltsch. Then, also in Yast2, I renamed the user mjeltsch into jeltsch and changed his home directory from /home/mjeltsch into /home/jeltsch. I also had to chown -R /tmp/mcop-jeltsch. Apparently everything works again, but all my desktop configuration is of course lost.

Crash on Michael’s Domain

Overstretched IT support

Quanta crashes during start-up (moving my account to a new user)