Linux nightmare

funny story:

Today I was going to update this space raegae.org, and meant to do some gameprogramming again in Blender after a while. I managed to make character that walks left when you press ‘A’ and camera follows along, kinda of a 3D/2D sidescroller. Then I noticed that if camera is exactly 90 degrees you get bumpy buggy shadows from spotlight in game engine. Then I found out that it is common problem in realtime shadows and that game engine in Blender is no longer maintained/updated, so no bugfixes. But luckily there is project called UPBGE, it is fork of Blender meant to improve the engine and fix bugs. I have Ubuntu Studio 14.04 and I downloaded Ubuntu version of UPBGE and it just did not start. I thought it had some conflict with already installed universal Blender installation, I deleted that and still no success with UPBGE. So i tested UPBGE in windows, i have dualboot even though I mainly work in linux. UPBGE worked in windows and that bumpy shadow bug was fixed. I thought that what a hell I want to make that work in Ubuntu also. There was building instructions for linux in UPBGE webpage and I had always wanted to build/compile/make some program, even though my linux coding skills arent that good. Downloading git repositories, all good, then installing dependencies and all seemed to be allright but I noticed that diskspace was running out. I tried desperately to delete files and unistall programs but finally diskspace ran out and installing dependencies fail and abort. No problem, I manage to delete some files and I thik that if I re enter that terminal command, maybe that dependency installation knows how to continue. Before that I got little excited about freeing space, I removed allkinds of weird pre-installed programs and games and stuff, which was good because I rarely organise stuff. I also used some terminal commands to clear all kinds of caches, temps, processes and unnecessary stuff. This was maybe exaggeration but I used software called BleachBit, CCleaner for linux. I had already ~ 600 megabytes free, but after a while I noticed that BleachBit was doing some swiping to my free disk space and it was again running out. BlechBit jammed and I restarted computer because I thought that maybe there is something that needs resorting at boot time. Fuckd up, Ubuntu did not anymore proceed after entering password. God Damit, what was I thinking, I knew that my nerdy skills arent that good and now my linux is jammed. But I did not give up, I managed to enter linux filesystem through windows and free some space. Ok, I admit that maybe windows might be handy sometimes.

hmm, and now it seems that I am back in original Ubuntu windowing layout (Unity) even though Ubuntu Studio has different windowing layout from mainstream Ubuntu, and it is removed now somehow. There is also weird glitches in the system, some icons missing and scrambled menubars but essentially everything is working. Bit bored to this operation, 600 megabytes diskspace just vanished and aborted compiling taking many hundreds of diskspace needing sorting. So I think I just do some backuping and make fresh reinstall of Ubuntu. And soon it is April so I think I wait new Ubuntu 18.04 LTS to appear and try that.

Long story short, making art with computers is not always that straightforward, and dont trust your linux skills toomuch : P

When you reinstall create 2 partitions, one for system (mounted as /) and another for your files (/home), this way if you do need to reinstall it’s pretty quick and easy, your files will always be there and it will only overwrite the system stuff. 14-16gb for / should be a good size to be on the safe side.

It sounds like you pulled in a whole shit-ton of unity dependencies and then booted in to unity when you logged back in.

Did you not have the option at the log in stage to choose your session? Xfce should be there still.

By the way, it looks like onhttps://download.upbge.org/ you chose Other Distro, from the instructions it gives for Debian based distros (which ubuntu is) you just needed to install the dependenciesblender llvm-dev libpugixml-dev and then run blender from the archive it gives, no compiling necessary. If that doesn’t work in a terminal type cd and then the destination of the downloaded and extracted archive, for example ‘cd /home/raegae/Downloads/UPBGEv0.2.3b2.79Linux64’ then type ./blender (or whatever the exact name of the file is they say to run). This will give you an error message and should point you in the direction you need, I would guess that one of the dependencies was too old. If it is too cryptic contacting them on irc should solve it pretty quickly.

Looking at the build script they provide some of the dependencies it builds are quite heavy to compile, from my gentoo days I seem to recall boost, llvm, ffmpeg taking a while. It also appears to rely of detecting your distro and ubuntu studio is detected as ubuntu so this probably explains why it dragged in Unity.

Seems like you had some bad luck with that, it’s not usually that complicated or intensive but running such an old version of ubuntu is often problematic.

Haha don’t worry I think all linux users went through such situations. Stuff is normally not fool-proof, and you can mess up things pretty easily if you try to do things the wrong way or if you don’t learn watching for certain things yourself. You can get very proficient in using and maintaining linux just by trying nontheless - either that, or you get so frustrated that you never want to touch linux again :-p

When you reinstall create 2 partitions, one for system (mounted as /) and another for your files (/home), this way if you do need to reinstall it’s pretty quick and easy, your files will always be there and it will only overwrite the system stuff. 14-16gb for / should be a good size to be on the safe side.

Definitely a good advice

It sounds like you pulled in a whole shit-ton of unity dependencies and then booted in to unity when you logged back in.

Did you not have the option at the log in stage to choose your session? Xfce should be there still.

… It also appears to rely of detecting your distro and ubuntu studio is detected as ubuntu so this probably explains why it dragged in Unity.

To be more specific that part of the story went like this: I remember that I had three desktop environments installed, Unity, Xfce and third one which name I cant recall. After using BleachBit, running out of diskspace and freeing it through windows, that third desktop environment had vanished from the list in login screen. If I tried Xfce session it just showed desktop background image and cursor and did not proceed any further. So I chose Unity session and at least that was working.

By the way, it looks like onhttps://download.upbge.org/ you chose Other Distro, from the instructions it gives for Debian based distros (which ubuntu is) you just needed to install the dependenciesblender llvm-dev libpugixml-dev and then run blender from the archive it gives, no compiling necessary. If that doesn’t work in a terminal type cd and then the destination of the downloaded and extracted archive, for example ‘cd /home/raegae/Downloads/UPBGEv0.2.3b2.79Linux64’ then type ./blender (or whatever the exact name of the file is they say to run). This will give you an error message and should point you in the direction you need, I would guess that one of the dependencies was too old. If it is too cryptic contacting them on irc should solve it pretty quickly.

I admit that all this compiling thing was unnecessary, I was just curious. First I did download that Debian version and installed those dependencies and tried actually that ./blender command also, but it did not launc. I cant recall completely but yeah terminal did say something like too old version of some dependency. And at this point my skills ran out, because I did not know how to install newer version of some pack with always same name. Anyways, I think reinstalling the whole system up to date is my best option, because I have been in this kind of situation many times earlier and so many things might be screwed. Like trying to get realtime kernels for audio and mangling with graphics drivers for 3D etc.

Haha don’t worry I think all linux users went through such situations. Stuff is normally not fool-proof, and you can mess up things pretty easily if you try to do things the wrong way or if you don’t learn watching for certain things yourself. You can get very proficient in using and maintaining linux just by trying nontheless - either that, or you get so frustrated that you never want to touch linux again :-p

I like all this nerding in linux, and yeah it is very educating, this time it just went into total mess. I think the main reason was that I was bit tired and hungry, so anything goes wrong in that state :wacko: