OK, it’s not a total data disaster, but basically, it potentially means the loss of almost all my outgoing email for the past three years or so.

When I migrated to Fedora 19 over the weekend, I did it on a new disk, retaining the old installation on the old one. After I did so, I copied my old files over to the new disk from it. Unfortunately, rather than doing it from the shell with a ‘cp -r *’ I just used the GUI tool to drag’n’drop. Which means that I didn’t get the hidden files. Which contain all of my Thunderbird folders. I still have all incoming mail, because I’m using IMAP, but the outgoing was in those folders.

It shouldn’t have been a problem, but when I went back to grab the rest, I’m getting an error message that the drive can’t be mounted, and warnings that the drive is failing. Is the data still recoverable? And if so, by me, or do I have to take it to a specialist?

Is there a doctor in the house? I decided to just go to Fedora 19 beta, since it’s going to be released in a few days anyway. It’s fine so far, except I’m running XFCE, and it refuses to give me a monitor size any larger than 1280×1040, so I’m losing about an inch on all sides with my 21″ LG.

I’ve changed the configuration in the settings editor to 1600×900, and the same in the display.xml file. But when I log out and back in again, it resets them to 1280×1040. I can’t find where in the system it’s getting this information, despite lots of grepping (is it misreading the signal from the monitor?), but it’s driving me nuts. And there doesn’t seem to be a configuration file for X any more.

Any ideas?

[Update a couple minutes later]

OK, it’s probably getting it from xrandr:

[simberg@linux-station ~]$ xrandr
xrandr: Failed to get size of gamma for output default
Screen 0: minimum 640 x 480, current 1280 x 1024, maximum 1280 x 1024
default connected 1280×1024+0+0 0mm x 0mm
1280×1024 0.0*
1280×720 0.0
1024×768 0.0
800×600 0.0
640×480 0.0

So how do I force a change?

[Late evening update]

Yes, the problem is likely some driver or new version of X or something inf F19 foxtrotting things up, because Fedora 18 recognized my monitor no problem. Just not sure what to do about it.

[Sunday morning update]

OK, I installed the latest Nvidia drivers from RPMFusion, and all is now well. It’s a beautiful screen, in fact.

Literally.

I just bought a new drive to upgrade from Fedora 14 to 18. So I load the new OS onto the new drive, which is drive 1, and keep my old installation as drive 2, figuring I can then just move the old data off it onto the new one. The problem is, it won’t let me. I can see the drive in the Gnome file browser, but my home directory has an “X” on it, and when I click on it, it tells me I don’t have permission to view it. I tried mounting it as root in the shell, and I’m not seeing anything on it that way. I know it’s all fine, because I can still boot from it and go back to the old system, but I can’t figure out how to access it from the new one.

Anyone have any suggestions?

The good news is that I’ve landed in California. The bad news is that we were diverted to San Diego due to some sort of problem at LAX.

More anon.

…a few minutes later.

OK, the plan is to refuel and then head up the coast. We’ll see how long that takes.

Update at 15:15 PDT. Heading home from LAX.