27 Feb
2022
27 Feb
'22
7:24 p.m.
Merely replacing the hard drive should not void your
warranty.
It was a joke. Installing Linux "voids the warranty"; I don't really intend
to
return the laptop. I'm sure it's a pretty good machine, if I can ever get it
running right. But just using it since early December, putting into my bag,
taking it out again, that has caused it to look just a bit used. So I don't
think it would work, putting the original hard drive back in, then trying to
return it for a refund.
;-)
Have you considered using LibreOffice themes?
https://ask.libreoffice.org/t/how-to-change-themes/4764/2
Will look into it, thanks.
> the breakage was already happening after a simple
> upgrade from the same system which had been running stable since early
> December.
It is conceivable that an upgrade broke something, but
that's not how
your emails set out the chain of events. According to the emails you
sent earlier, you spotted some unexpected entries in top, removed a
bunch of packages until those entries went away, and only then, did the
browsers stop working.
I did not remove a "bunch of packages" I tried to find the source of whatever
made those unwelcome visitors appear so prominently in top. I didn't actually
remove those items.
Earlier you suggested that the unwelcome entries in top "seem to have
been dragged in when I trying to get tork-trinity working". If those
libraries were dependencies of tork-trinity, why did you remove them?
The items were not dependencies of tork-trinity. I was trying to find
tork-trinity dependencies (libevent, geoclue, etc.), but installed some
near-namesakes by mistake. It was those extra packages that I removed.
Over the course of these threads, you have said that
you have
reinstalled the OS multiple times, "and had already pruned everything
that seemed to be the cause", you have copied over the preferences
from your old desktop, you forcefully removed packages that were
marked as hard dependencies with dpkg --prune --force-all, and who knows
what else you have done.
You have made so many changes to what *was* a working system, it doesn't
surprise me that things are not working correctly.
And I kept track of what was removed. And I reinstalled them, to no effect.
And then I did a complete reinstallation. By "pruning" I meant that I did not
follow my usual method for installation on a system that is running
comfortably well.
I have text files saved that have a list of packages to be installed, so that
I only have to paste in those names. I kept my old lists from my desktop,
which was running Devuan Beowulf. I copied over my home folder to my laptop,
tried to follow those lists to install Devuan Chimaera to the laptop. And for
the most part, this worked just fine. A few things had changed, and I
adapted.
And by the way, I've been doing it like this since I started running KDE3,
back in about 2006-2008 or so. I've run either KDE3 or TDE since then. I have
gone through PC Linux, Kubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04x, Debian since about 6 or 7,
I believe, and then switched to Devuan since Jessie.
Never seen anything like this.
I am not an expert on the detailed internals of how gtk+ libraries are
dynamically linked with applications, but given that your browsers are
working correctly under xfce now, I think it would be worth logging
out, logging back in to TDE, and see if they work again.
And if they do work now, for pity's sake, stop removing packages!
When I put things back to how they were before (because I have all the saved
packages, and lists of what I installed when), I am able to reproduce what I
did. When I reinstall, and try to put the system back to how it was before,
this same problem occurs. It doesn't matter that I tried to put it back the
same as before.
Bill