How do I Change between Desktop 1 and Desktop 2 Using Sparky Repair 4.1?

[oldefoxx]

Laptops and their touchy touchpads will be the death of me yet.  They deny you palmrest, so your hands have to hover, and the keys are placed in unusual ways at the fringes, so missing the right key is easy, especially as you hands have to range about and not get too close to the touchpad.  On this keyboard, some keys are too small the key for backslash and vertical bar takes half the space of the Enter key,  so the Enter key is vertical into the normal spot for the other key.  Makes no sense at all.  And the ledt shift key's position is half taken up with a duplicate backslash and vertical bar key.  So miss-types by me are common.

And this is not even the worse key layout I've seen.  The HP ENVY 17 K073ca which I have the misfortune to own as well, is even worse in all respects.  Last time I buy a laptop over the Internet just on specs and what was suppose to be a good name brand.  Last time I buy HP at all, because it is junk inside and out, nothing right about it.  No real engineering went into it, it is all about show.

The ports are too close together for attachments and unmarked/unlabled, the touchpad is too large and too sensative, and the keys are widely spaced apart, what they call an "island Keyboard", making it harder to type than ever.  It shorted out two weeks after its limited warrantee expired (90 day limit as it was bought certified refurbished), and I and the repair shop discovered/learned you have to remove 15 screws (one hidden by a slot tab) just to get the bottom off,  You have to take it completely apart to get to the memory, and half-way apart to get to the hard drive.  The battery aupport and latches are so small and flimsy that the battery keeps falling out, and it can take 20 minutes to get it into position where you hope the latches will hold.  But no guarantees they will.

Meanwhile the laptop has repeatedly shorted out and burned out 3 ac adapters.  One of them a 120-watt replacement for a laptop rated to only need 90 watts of power.  The shop won't touch it again because they don't know what is wrong, and are seriously thinking about refusing all HP laptops in the future because they are too much trouble to deal with, as they are all badly laid out inside and out.  Desktops might be another matter, as there are some design constraints and standards there.  But I am out hundreds of dollars, cannot afford a replacement, but told HP in writing this would not be forgotten.  Consider yourself warned.

I need and instruction guide for the Sparky Repair Interface, or an alternate interface that gives me more control and detail.  I can recommend Metacity as doing the most, or installing gnome-session-flashback as it supports several interfaces and gives you choice on the login page.  One of those choices is Metacity.  A better candidate is gnome-session-fallback, but someone decided it gave the user too much ower under Ubuntu, so it was removed.  Flashback only expands to two users though, which can be a handicap.  Others users can be added, but they only get the default interface.  The default interface is whatever interface(s) that are covered in the initial install, unless some change is made.

The best web browser to date for control is Flashpeak's Slimjet at slimjet.com.  It does not require a Repository, as when it starts, it checks online for any updates on its own.  The best VM Manager is not Virtualbox, but Oracle.s Virtualbox at virtualbox.org.  Looking at /etc/apt/sources.list and the contents of /etc/apt/sources.d/*.list files, you are not treating Sparky Rescue as a full blown LiveCD, which it could be by simply adding more entries in both places and making a few tweaks to the installer.

I believe every LiveCD needs to go out with the possibility that the existing installs, drives, and partitions have been compromised, and every effort to rescue the /home entries be made, while also picking up all evidence of what had been installed with the goal of bringing as much of that back as possible based on the lists above and the PPAs if those can be recovered.  Then the recovered data be copied off, or sufficient steps taken to stableize the recoverable partitions and rebuild the partition table so that new partitions can be created and formatted, and the recovered data copied to them, or to a stable removable drive.

Take the guesswork out of it.  If several rools agree on what they find, then that is the best that can be done, so go with it and make it happen.  I don't know what is going on with file management tools, but ext4 is crapping all over ext2, ext3, and ext4, and the drivers for Ubuntu-Gnome 16.04 are all bad, as I've tried FAT32, NTFS, JFX, XFS, EXT2, EXT3, EXT4. and had to stop there.  Reason for stopping is that these are the only formats also recognized by gparted as well, and I don;t know which tool to trust when it comes to formatting, laying in the superblocks, and reading and writing data, updating the tables, writing and reading the journal files (if applicable), keeping up with the links and inodes (if applicable). and so on.

I'm off all flavors of Ubuntu at the moment as they all show similar problems in varying degress from 14.04 LTS on, and the more recent versions are the worse.  But whether that should be Debian in general is currently unknown, and Sparky Rescue is my dry run to find out.  Just in case, I got Ubuntu 8.04, 9.04, 10.04, 11.04, and 12.04 as fallbacks and burned them to DVD-RWs.  I am looking into making multiple ISOs all bootable from one or more USB drives.  Most tools for this purpose were written for Windows, and Windows showed me crap for reliability, as chkdsk was not good at repairing NTFS volumes.  With XP they asdded Scandisk, but it was no good either, and not as good as chkdsk, so it got dropped.  With Linux volumes, I want someone that knows linux to do it and do it right.  Gparted sees what is there to be seen, but makes few changes.  It calls gpart for data rescue, but supposedly only in a Read Only mode.  But they are actually right sometimes or in part, and I might actually be able to retrieve all or part of the data with gpart or other tools.  Trouble is, this all takes time, and I've been fighting this battle daily for several months now, and it is not coming together.

I Sparky Rescue fails, I will start working back through my LiveCDs until I find a point where sanity is reestablished.  Right now I blame it on developers and maintainers that don't know their craft as well as they think they do, or what the package is all about that they assumed responsibility for.

But it could be deliberate as well I suppose, though that is a hard reach, even for me. What would be the point or gain?  Some hacker outhacking all other hackers by attacking the system most use and depend on?  All that he has to do is bypass software safeguards and go direct hardware access.  Software is always vulnerable in this regard.  Even hardware defenses can be circumvented, bypassed, or gone through with time, effort, and the right tools.  Look at prison breakouts, tunnels under walls and up through floors to get into vaults, or a mile-long tunnel to get a drug cartel lord out of prison.  All you do is delay matters with these defenses until either someone alert sees what is happening, or they get through.   Long holidays were long enough for several major bank heists in the past.

Trump's idea that a wall alone will keep bad people out is as brainless as Obama's belief that taking legal guns away from law abiding citizens will bet them out of the hands of criminals and terrorists.  History clearly shows these are not answers for what is wrong in Americas or the world at large.  Look at the people fleeing their homes in the middle east and seeking refuge and new lives elsewhere.  They are mostly unarmed, and that hasn't helped them.  Many are now stuch in refugee camps because the country that they reached don't want them there.  Germany is having to deal with a rash liberal decision to let them come in for humanitarian reasons, and other countries are now not ready to follow in their steps because these are people apart from what they expected.  Even the passive ones are bound to a different set of values and beliefs, and they need more than a place to stay.

Obama wants more here, more people to enter from Mexico, and wants terrorists freed, plus he trusts the Iranians to keep their word because he believes what he wants to believe.  He's a fool because he refuses to face facts and does not know his history or where to turn to for real advice, which is from people who have done their homework.    Do a search on terms like "chamberlain paper hitler" and learn what I mean.  How is that totally different than the Iranian deal?  The people in Iran and North Korea are just as untrustworthy as was Gerrmany at the time.  And we have grave concerns about Pakistan as well.  China is not our ally either, just a trading partner, and for only as long as it benefits them, like gaining access to our technology every way possible and dumping goods here to gain a financial windfall.

I still haven't got it down as to how to make the Desktops change, or exactly how to switch between opwn threads, but I've real work to attend to as testdisk says I need to reboot.  Not sure ehy, as that partition is currently without an install, but let me see if I can get all these threads closed first.  Otherwise I have wasted time and effort.

[she_dyed]

now that you have gotten that out of your system, you can write a script to switch desktops, but that would require far more space than a forum allows. In my case, I set up two user profiles, each with different desktops. When I wanted to see how badly GNOME has gone, I sign on with the other one. I hope that clues you in on possible routes to tackle your dilemma. And yes, I did get rid of the other desktop...and the other user.