It's time to try a new distribution

The Manjaro XFCE desktop with my keyboard bokeh as background.

Now I run the new kid on the blog Arch based Manjaro distro with a XFCE desktop. It's a superfast system with a lightweight distro on a decent PC.

Manjaro use the Linux 4.14.36-1-MANJARO GNU/Linux kernel. Updates are rolling.

Installing Manjaro

• Unplugged the /home drive (a 2TB harddisk)
• Installed Manjaro on the SSD stardup disk
• Added a user
• Replugged /home disk
• Followed this guide

First I had to find the /home disk ID by:

# blkid

Then /etc/fstab was edited and this info was added:

# UUID=b87ebb56-f4df-43ee-918a-fa69xxxxxxxx   /home    ext4          defaults       0       2

A nice surprice
After a reboot the system was up and running. To my surprise the users could access their shares immediately. And a very pleasant surprise was the fact that even shortcuts from Nautilus was preserved and ready for use in the XFCE file manager Thunar.

Even symbolic links to certain shared folders were preserved.

SSD - contemplating more real estate
Well my 120GB SSD ran full after an Ubuntu SQL update of some kind. I tried to solve the problem by a new install, but Ubuntu was not able to do a decent dist-update.

After several crashes I decided that enough was enough. So I droppedUbuntu (for a while I guess ...)

The real problem isn't Ubuntu but the fact that the SSD should have more GBs. I guess that it is necessary to follow the development on the boot drive or to update the hardware.

Ubuntu: failed to connect fo lvmetad

Phew ... all's well that ends well.

Had this error: "Ubuntu: failed to connect fo lvmetad". Ubuntu booted into a shell. The /home partition was not mounted. I tried to edit the fstab, but the /home share would not mount on boot.

However it was possible to mount the drive, like:

# mount -a

In the failsafe Ubuntu version I cound boot into a menu, with several options. If a fsck was run, the /home would mount, and the boot process could continue.

An error message stated, that there was an error on the /dev/sda5 - and Ubuntu recommended a "manual fsck".

So I booted into the shell, and ran fsck. There were tons of errors, Basicly the prompt asked "shall I repair this or that error". I answered "y" every time. Fsck found some 30 - 40 errors. Then fsck stated, that the system was clean.

I booted ... and ...

to my great surprise everything worked. As in: OK!

During the failsafe mode the CPU ran like hell: 50% or more all the time. The temperature was not a problem. But of course the fans ran like hell. Now everything is back to normal. The CPUs run around 20% when I use a browser, Spotify and what not.

So we're back to normal after a weird trip to shell-land.