Issues with New Install After Keeping Old Home Directory

General system Newbie
1

Hi there endeavouros community

Since I broke my system or it broke itself, i couldnt change the state of it even with the help of some of you all.
In the end i used the installer to reinstall EOS and at manual partitioning i selected my old /home as my new /home and selected keep instead of format for it.

i am now inside the OS and all the programs i installed (those that dont come with the factory EOS) all have a pop-up window that says failed to execute command */path/to/old_application* (no such file or directory
is there any way to revert/fix this?

i found just reinstalling them readds the icon but the app is still broken and doesnt open.
Thanks to everyone helping
cheers.

2

What was your method for installing these programs?

Can you give a specific example of one of the applications that has this error message?

How are you launching the application when you get the error message? If you launch the application another way (for example, from another launcher or from the terminal) do you get the same error message?

What is the path in the error message?

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3

Perhaps try creating a new user account, log in as that user, and see if you experience the same issues with applications.

Generally, it’s better to exercise some scrutiny when restoring application data from backups, otherwise one may re-introduce an old issue, or create a new one.

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4

hi, for almost all of the apps i used either pacman or yay.

5

And the others?

When you have a chance, take a look at the rest of the questions here.

It will be good to add more information to the thread because so far there is not a lot to go on.

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6

I didn’t answer the other questions as i am still at work. when i get (around in an hour) I’ll inform you.

also one or two applications were manually installed with makepkg and one or two others with flatpak.

7

Opera, Discord, Terminator. those apps also dont show up inside the EndeavourOS search tab under all applications. only if i search for them do i find the reinstalled one (opera).

If i do it over the panel i get the error message failed to execute command */path/to/old_application* (no such file or directory) for discord it is /usr/bin/discord, for terminato it says ``failed to run child process “terminator (no such file or directory)”` and since i installed opera again i dont get any error message but the app doesnt launch.

if i run opera over terminal it says the profile appears to be in use by another opera process (xxxx) on another computer (MY USER). Opera has locked the profile so it doenst get corrupted. if you are sure no other processes are using this profile you can unlock and relaunch opera

You mean the path to the app? cause i dont have a path to the error message. if you mean for the error message, how do i find out?

Thx

8

Try moving the config directories to backup temporarily to test if the old configurations in your home directory are causing conflicts.

mv ~/.config/discord ~/.config/discord_backup
mv ~/.config/terminator ~/.config/terminator_backup
mv ~/.config/opera ~/.config/opera_backup

Then open the app and see if you get a different result.

Examine the Exec= line for the desktop files of these applications in /usr/share/applications to confirm they are pointing to an executable that actually exists on your system.

Just checking: you actually own the home directory, right?

chown -R aet:aet /home/aet

Obviously change aet to whatever your username is.

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9

for the reinstalled app (opera) it now opens, the other two still have the same error message.

the opera one does, the others dont exist…

so do i have to manually reinstall all my missing apps to then use them again, but with reset config? or is there a way to not do it all manually


§ chown -R ae:ae /home/ae
chown: cannot read directory '/home/ae/.cache/yay/xlivebg/pkg': Permission denied
chown: cannot read directory '/home/ae/.cache/yay/intel-graphics-compiler-git/pkg': Permission denied

and thats all the output

edit: also something maybe useful, my system does take my old wallpaper as background as well as my other appeareance settinf

10

Yes, it sounds like they are not installed.

Just to clarify: usually applications are not stored in your home directory. If you reinstall the OS, it is normal to have to reinstall your applications as well (even if you are re-using the home partition).

That seems fine, I wouldn’t worry about that. If you did not have ownership of the home directory there would be way more output than that.

11

ia there really no file where all the prior installed apps are written? like somewhere in pacman?

also, to clarify, the opera i could open didn’t have my configurations, tabhistory etc.

12

There are many ways to list all installed packages with Pacman. You can even list only the explicitly installed packages, which can be useful for reinstalling your packages after a fresh installation: https://wiki.archlinux.org/title/Pacman/Tips_and_tricks#List_of_installed_packages You would need to run this from the old installation, where the packages are installed.

Unless you save a list somewhere ahead of time, you cannot list packages which were installed on your old installation from your new one if all that you saved is the home directory. None of Pacman’s files, nor any of the applications themselves, are stored in the home directory.

That stuff is in the config directory you moved to backup. You can move it back of course, but obviously you will just need to figure out how to release the profile lock in order to carry on using it.

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