going back to Ubuntu 14.04
 

I installed Ubuntu 16.04 to 'update' 14.04 and things have gone to heck ever since. Is there a way to undo this update?

I broke the rule "Never fix something that ain't broke!"

Hi...

From what I see here, it would probably be better to just back up everything you want to save and reinstall 14.04 from scratch. :(

Regards...

no.
save your personal data, re-install, or even better: inform yourself about ubuntu's (and maybe other distros') release cycles, and decide what you want to use.

tip:
i use a rolling release distro. higher maintenance, but no re-install ever.

For anyone else reading this thread, I can't say it enough times: make a full backup of your system before carrying out anything that might fundamentally affect your system, and that includes upgrades. That way, if something goes wrong, you can easily revert to a known good configuration.

It's easy to create a bootable flash drive that will boot up into software that allows you to back up your partitions to an external hard drive (I use Macrium Reflect on a YUMI boot flash but there are more popular options).

With fresh install it makes sense to go 16.x.

Not if things went "to heck" for the OP with the upgrade, although we don't know if it was the upgrade process or 16.04 not playing ball with their hardware, or something else.

One option for the OP is to reinstall 14.04 and get that working as it was before, because they know it worked, but also set up another partition with 16.04 and use that to test the hardware.

Of course, it's difficult to be more precise when we don't know what "to heck" means - it's not very descriptive in showing us what's gone wrong. Has the hardware stopped working? Did the upgrade process actually finish successfully? etc.

Thank you hydrurga. I appreciate all the responses from others as well, but ...

Two questions hydrurga:
1. Can you point me to where it will tell me how to make the bootable flash drive you mention? Once I have that I'll need to know how to back up my partitions to an external hard drive. I already have and external hard drive, but everything I have on it are things I have copied from other hard drives - there is no system backup to allow me to reinstall because I do not know how to make one.
2. Regarding things going to heck, it's little things such as I can't move anything by right-click as I used to in 14.04. That means from folder to folder or to the trash. I have a bunch of junk on my desktop that I can't get rid of. Now I can't print, even after installing the HP fix I found by following one of the instructions here (my printer is an HP Officejet Pro 8600 fyi). The upgrade did finish and most functions of 16.04 work - it is just the things I mentioned. For example I'm using it now to write this in the Chromium Browser. Once I can figure out how to create the bootable flash drive, I'll be asking how to install to a particular partition without messing up everything else. So far I've just let the installations do as they want to and until this time everything has worked (except on one install it destroyed the windows installation so no dual boot there ;-)

It is very likely nothing is wrong with 16, it was just the upgrade that didn't go well. Cleaning up home directory config files would probably fix all the problems with upgrade to 16.

Yeah, a clean install is probably better after a back up. But anyway, would be nice to know what went wrong and what doesn't work.

Thanks Emerson. How do I clean up home directory config files? Are there instructions posted somewhere?

Thanks Mitt Green. Here's some of what is wrong: I can't move anything by right-click as I used to in 14.04. That means from folder to folder or to the trash. I have a bunch of junk on my desktop that I can't get rid of. Now I can't print, even after installing the HP fix I found by following the instructions I found in one of the other threads (my printer is an HP Officejet Pro 8600 fyi). When I downloaded a file to attempt to fix, it would not let me tell it where to download, it just put it in the download folder which I did not know how to access to run the fix.
Right now not being able to print is the main problem. When I try to print it spits out a page with a single line of text and then ejects paper until it runs out (or I shut it off).

1. In order to do it the particular way I do it, you need a Windows VM or machine to create the original bootable flash drive (the Windows version of YUMI is better and Macrium Reflect is a Windows program - my reasons for doing this are purely historic), but I've heard a lot of people talk well of Clonezilla Live (http://clonezilla.org/clonezilla-live.php inc. instructions). You should give that a go.

2. Those problems sound eminently solvable. You should create new separate threads for them if you can't find any solutions on the internet. Just keep with it and let us know how you get on.

IMHO, if OP wants a 16.04 that works ootb, he may want to give Lite 3.0 a try.
BTW and FWIW, a clean install after partitioning and/or reformatting at least the /home is far better than what the OP tried to do.
Nonetheless, best wishes and 'Never give up!'

I've read your previous thread. Do you have gvfs installed? It manages Trash or Wastebasket. Also providing a screenshot of how you can't delete something would be nice, if possible.

For managing HP printers you need HPLIP. Do you have it? Also try recommendations in this post, if you haven't yet.

Irish666,

http://askubuntu.com/questions/22381...sb-flash-drive

Run the below commands to format the USB to FAT32 file system from terminal:

This helps to discover your USB drive, which MAY be /dev/sdc (example only).

Then unmount the device:

Format device to FAT32 (NB this will wipe all existing data on the USB drive!):

Put the downloaded .iso image for Ubuntu 16.04 64bit or Linux Mint 18 64 bit (or whatever) onto your Desktop.

Then use dd command to install Linux Mint 18 MATE 64 bit (in this example).

After a few minutes, if all has gone well, you should receive output similar to this:

Another rabbit hole :-(

I first went to http://askubuntu.com/questions/22381...sb-flash-drive which somehow got me to installing GParted - but that would not run because I need Administrator privileges - which since I am the ONLY user I thought I'd have ....

Then on to step 2 where I list everything (and it is quite a list): there are 15 /dev/ram 's; dev/sda 931.5GiB with dev/sda1, dev/sda2, & dev/sda3; dev/sdb 232.9 with sdb1,sdb2, sdb5, sdb6, & sdb 7; dev/sdg 2.7TiB with sdg1 (13.76G empty) & sdg2 (18.5M EFI(FAT-12/16/32); and finally /dev/sdh 59.6 GiB which I take to be the thumbdrive.

I did the umount command sucessfully (umount /dev/sdh) , BUT then it would not "mkdosfs -F 32 -I /dev/sdh".
The error message reads: "mkdosfs: unable to open /dev/sdh: Device or resource busy"

Everything I try leads to something else which then leads to something else - all I want is for my printer to work again. Just today so far I have spent 3 hours and am no closer to a solution then when I started this morning.

Could I call someone for live help? If you would be willing to try to talk me through some of this, please email a phone number that I can call with good time to call to irish666@att.net - thanks, Tom