Does the right click on the desktop bring up a menu? If it does open a terminal and start xfce-panel and xfdesktop manualy, I have had to do this occassionally after a new install after soing it once it seems to be OK, I think it may be a problem with the settings menager, if not drop to a console and try removing the xfce config files that might help

Post the entire contents of your /ect/fstab file.

fstab below:-

# /etc/fstab: static file system information.
#
# Use 'blkid' to print the universally unique identifier for a
# device; this may be used with UUID= as a more robust way to name devices
# that works even if disks are added and removed. See fstab(5).
#
# <file system> <mount point> <type> <options> <dump> <pass>
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol00 / ext3 errors=remount-ro 0 1
# /boot was on /dev/sda6 during installation
UUID=16969830-d71a-49fb-9706-6859071fdd77 /boot ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol02 /home ext3 defaults 0 2
/dev/mapper/VolGroup00-LogVol01 none swap sw 0 0
/dev/fd0 /media/floppy0 auto rw,user,noauto,exec,utf8 0 0

No it does not.

Do you mean delete the files and re-install them? I can log in as a guest user and the desktop is fine, does this make any difference?

thanks
jay

yes just remove the xfce config files from your home folder and xfce should recreate them witj valid defaults

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Is that the home folder under root? because it is empty or do I need to manually mount the home partition and check for the xfce files there?
thanks

you should have a home folder named for your login name in /home eg mine is /homekeithhedger, my login name is keithhedger if you have no home folder then somthing went wrong creating your user you may have to login as root delete your user account and recreate it

1 members found this post helpful.

I can only login as root through the recovery menu and the filesystem is read-only in this mode. Ubuntu does not appear to have a root account enabled by default and the guest account is also read only, so it looks like i am in a catch 22 situation....

thisbis one of the main drawbacks of ubuntus stupid policy on disabling root, if your user account gets fubar'ed you cant log in as rootvand fix it, you can boot to a live disk, mount your xubuntu partition, chroot into it and set a root password to enable the root account, but it looks like the whole install is mucked up, I would personally save any data I really need and then do a full install.

I would be also inclined not to use the home partition as it dwoesn'tvseem to be mounting properly /home should not be empty it should be a mountpoint with the contents of the home partition mounted there, just use a normal home folder and when you are up and running you can always just copy the contents off of you old home partition

Ok, thanks. Is it better to just use the default /home folder during the install and then provide a mount point for my home partition in the home folder? I would prefer to keep my existing home partition - I thought it was supposed to be good practice of sorts... to have a separate home partition so that when you try a new distro you can always keep your data?

its swings and roundabouts if you use a seperate home partition, installing a new os can invalidate a lot of the user settings and cause problems, I personall never use a seperate home partition, but I keep all universal data like music, projects etc in their own partitions, you pays your money and makes your choice.

As an aside the home partition should be mounted on /home NOT /home/LOGINNAME.

You should be able to log into the desktop as user from recovery mode even in Ubuntu. Try, when you get the root prompt (#) typing Ctrl + d.

This should give you a user prompt ($).

If not, at the # type su <your user name>. This should then prompt your for your user password and then give you your normal user prompt ($).

Use startx at the user prompt.

Your personal config files are normally referred to as ~/.foo files. Note the . before foo. This hides the files so you don't have to wade through them all the time. You can see them by typing Ctrl + h when you have your file manager up.

If you look in the /root directory (will have to be as root) you will see it is not empty if you look at those ~/.foo files in it.

At that point you could compare your personal ~/.bashrc file with the one for root and see what a difference there is in those 2 users.

You can see what the files are from the tty prompt in your /home/<user name> directory by;
assuming you are using a user prompt ($) at the tty.

Also will work fine in any terminal emulater from the desktop at the user prompt.

You will see that this would be a real pain to have visible in your file browser all the time.

The ones for xfce should be ~/.config/xfce4. Removing that and rebooting should regenerate that file to the default settings. This should include your panel.

I am, by the way, not a fan of LVM.

1 members found this post helpful.

Ok I am in! BUT, I tried running startx as myself using su <user name> and received a permission denied error as well as a xauthority timeout error so I ran dpkg-reconfigure x11-common (thankyou google) and selected the 'anybody' option so that any user could run startx, then I changed the ownership of the .Xauthority file and .ICEauthority because they both belonged to root and then I ran startx and it worked but once in the desktop I received an error message stating that write permission was denied to the .cache directory, I have also been unable to load my bookmarks in the firefox browser so I had another look at the files in my /home folder and found that a lot of the files have the ownership set to 500 but my id on the system is 1000 - is this causing all of the permission errors and if so, how can I change the ownership of all files and directories in my home folder to my username?

Thanks
jay