sorry for the dumb question but im desperate
 

Hey guys, im having an absolute hoot playing around with my new Mandrake install (being a total newbie and all). But in the process of having 'fun', i have made some very interesting changes that have resulted in me not being able to login as my user, so i have to login as root. Anyway, that is not the problem. The problem is, i need to know exactly where Gaim stores your logs. I know the question has been asked before, but i am very new and i have a bit of a problem understanding the answer. The reason i need them is that i got Gaim setup and logged on, and lo and behold talked to some relatives who just happened to be online that i havent talked to in months. I would like to find the log file for that, and also the photos they sent me. Here is what the website has to say:


Where does gaim store its logs?



On unix, they are in ~/.gaim/logs, on win32 they are in the $drive\Documents and Settings\user\Application Data\.gaim\logs directory. In either case, new logs (new as of 0.73) are in subdirectories that correspond to protocol/yourscreenname/theirscreenname.


Ok, so what does the tilde mean in the above instruction?
~/.gaim/logs? I dont know where that is :D Please help!

~ means "/home/user/", where "user" is the name of the non-root user who uses gaim.

btw, i hate to break it to you but i believe gaim does not enable logging of conversations by default. if you enabled this in preferences before you had your conversation, then you're good though.

Ok, thanks, at least now i know what that means :D Anyway, like i said, in some ways i may have p00ched my install, but for now at least, i am able to login (only) as root, with kde being my window mgr (shrug). The thing is, there is no dir for gaim in that directory. I KNOW it is there somewhere, because i saw it earlier, when i was looking for it (cant remember where it was now though, DOH!) It was called gaim_history.so, but i dont know what external app i would use to open it, and since i am root right now, i cant log into my user account, to log into gaim.....to see my logs!!!! Grrrrrrr!! :D Any other ideas? What would i use to open an .so file? Thanks for the help :)

maybe you can't find it cause it's ".gaim" (with a period in front) instead of "gaim" - a hidden folder. if you want to find a file, try the "locate" command.

what exactly did you do right before you couldn't login as user anymore? what error does it give or how does it act when you try to login?

Well, what i was doing was playing with that "SystemRestore CD" you can d/l from the Partition Image page. I was trying to image my install over onto another empty partition. I should mention that i am just feeling my way through the learning process and i fully expected when i started out to screw up at least one install :D Anyway, basically partimage tried to build and write the image, then responded saying there wasnt enough space available ( i think what i did was accidentally made the source and target partitions the same)......so, next time i boot up, i can only login to KDE as root, and i dont seem to be able to get Gnome started. I think i may have screwed some user-specific files? Or the possibility that somehow i am booting from some sort of default image? That is most of it in a nutshell, sorry i cant be a whole lot more specific :D

oy, that sounds complicated and hard to fix. try logging in as root and deleting the old user and creating a new one. that should at least get you into kde as user. i don't know about getting gnome back though....

maybe you can uninstall all the gnome packages with whatever package manager there is with mandrake, and then install it again from the mandrake cds.

this sounds like a weird problem that might involve no free disc space or something. can you post the output of "df -h" from the terminal on this post?

Ok, hold on, i think i might have something here.....i used the console to try and find the files, and it said 'run updatedb'.....so i did, then did a search for the file......and found it!!!! I see all the logs in there now....ok, now the thing is, to root, they are not accessible? How do i switch from root to user access from the console? Is that what i will have to do to be able to open the .txt files?

no. root has authority over all files and you should be able to open them as root. try something like "emacs" or "vi" then the name of the file. or you can open the editor in kde (kate).

again, i'm curious to see the output of "df -h"

Just a little FYI: gaim_history.so sounds like a shared object/library, and probably just the plugin code for gaim to generate a history, but not the actual text from any particular chat. What's the filename and location of the files you're currently trying to open? Try an ls -al in the directory they're in and post the results here.

The console im using is RXvt, and i cant get it to copy/paste..........i think i remember how to switch.....hang tight :)

yeah, proud is right about gaim_history.so. the way you read old conversations is "tools>View Sytem Log" in the gaim buddy list window.

Ok, what is the command to switch consoles again? Or to see which one your using? Cant remember.....but i think i was using bash before...

Bash is a shell, i think you're confusing Bash and the console. i'm not quite sure what you're asking - do you mean switching to the CLI with ctrl+alt+Fx?

Ok, in that case i am using the RXvt shell......how do i switch shells? This one doesnt seem to be capable of copying output text......