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Trying to Restore Zorin 12, or The Dangers of PPA Spelunking

veeseaczar

Sun Jul 30, 2017 3:22:55 am

Hey friends.

Soooooooooo I really wanted to have full control over every aesthetic element of Zorin 12, so I got to figuring out how to install GNOME 3 by itself, free of Zorin's hand. (That may make very little sense, but I'm a novice.) In order to install the latest GNOME shell, I added two very bad news repos... Basically Canonicals latest Ubuntu stuff. It even actively said "This is only for Ubuntu 17.04 and later" and urged me what I was about to do was a bad idea if I was unsure.

So naturally I went on, installed those repos, and did a dist-upgrade, via some Ask Ubuntu thread.

Everything was more or less fine until I tried to upgrade some packages. Apt told me nearly everything related to GNOME and Zorin Appearance suite was broken. Upon reboot, I the loading screen (which was once the beloved hexagon-encircled Z) changed to what I believe is the Debian 8 loading screen [UPDATE: it isn't. The logo doesn't belong to Cinnamon, XFCE, GNOME, Canonical, Debian, or Zorin currently... it closely resembles the Squarespace logo, though]... whats worse it would not advance past this screen. I basically bashed on the keyboard until A Thing (tm) happened: I was presented with a list of services and files loading well and not so well behind the scenes. What was clearly not well was that LightDM, the new Ubuntu display manager, could not start.

So I reckoned I needed to get rid of LightDM and get back the old display manager, which I think is GDM3? After a whole day of trial and error, plus figuring out how to get the recovery terminal to connect to WiFi via wpa_supplicant, I got rid of LightDM and put GDM3 back on the system.

Reboot. Debian 8 loading screen still shows up, but now I get the Zorin Login Screen. Login works.. but the shell looks different, like maybe Debian 8 or Ubuntu 16's feel. I reinstalled all the of the "zorin-appearance" and "gnome-shell-extension-zorin" type packages listed in an apt-search. Even recovered packages that sounded important, like "zorin-os-desktop".

Largely everything is back to normal now, save the following:
Unidentified load screen.
Debian 8 Lock screen. (Says "Debian 8")
Zorin GTK Shell is incomplete... some styles missing, like dividers between buttons in Zorin, toggle sliders.

In the mean time, I'll use XFCE sessions which I start by using the Zorin login page and clicking the little gear under the password entry, as the styles and functionality here seem entirely untouched.

I'd really like to restore Zorin to its full glory though, hopefully without formatting the hard drive. Any one have any ideas? I can be more specific as you request.

Swarfendor437

Sun Jul 30, 2017 6:04:24 am

Oh dear! You have by your own admission broken your install and forgotten the time old adage "don't fix what ain't broke"! If you have any critical data I would backup your home folder but don't backup any hidden settings. A fresh install is your best way forward. Zorin 12 is a rolling LTS release so when they know things will be stable updates will filter down through updates, a lesson in patience!