Squashed a bug that caused Social to explode when friending or sending a message.   Many more remain.

     All machines have been successfully rebooted.  Three of them did not successfully properly remount /home and /mail from NFS servers and I had to remount them manually, they were debian, scientific, and scientific7.  All are good now.

     I plan on rebooting pretty much everything around 1AM Saturday morning.  This is to load new kernels in hopes a bug or two might be squashed.  If all goes well, downtime for any given service should not be longer than 10-15 minutes.

     The update to phpBB3 3.2.2 forced the elimination of many themes and allowed the addition of some new themes. If you don’t like the look of the board, go into your profile, select board settings and try some other themes.

     Two that I like the most, “proflat” which is fully responsive and so an excellent choice if you use Eskimo North’s forums from a portable device or low resolution screen and it also looks pretty good on a high resolution screen as it makes fairly efficient use of the space. And a second theme I like is “latte” but it is fixed width like previous themes.

     The ticket system at Support->Tickets is now fixed and available for use.

     It was reported to me that registration was broken in the forums.  I checked and sure enough.  I chased this down to some mistakes I made in upgrading to 3.2.2, I did not remove all the incompatible themes and extensions first.

     I have corrected this but the downside is all the non-default themes, extensions, and language packs are gone until I get around to installing new versions compatible with 3.2.2 however, registration now works again.

     I’ve been unable to get Gnome to work at all, and I’ve been unable to get KDE to be stable with any prebuilt repositories including those that Zorin includes.

     So now I am attempting to build KDE from source, and in the attempt found that qt5 is largely broken so I’ve had to backup and now am working on building qt5 from source.  This is turning into more work than I want and I may decide to ditch Zorin as just a too immature and broken operating system to be worth supporting.

Title says it all.  So difficult getting different window systems to peacefully co-exist.  There is a newer release out than what I had installed.  Perhaps it is less broken.

Downloading

     I added a PPA for KUbuntu backports to Zorin which had newer versions of most of the KDE packages.  By applying those upgrades it is now mostly functional.  Powerdevil explodes but so do similar packages in other window managers and I think the reason is that it is running in a virtual machine, it has no real hardware to twiddle.  I would just remove it but like the other window managers there are stupid dependencies that require it’s non-functional presence for other things to work.  A similar situation exists with some bluetooth packages.  No actual hardware but if they aren’t here dependencies break other things.

     All shells are now installed.

     KDE mostly works now, the plasmashell explodes in theory because of missing plasmoids but said plasmoids are not part of the Zorin distribution.  I am attempting to locate them elsewhere.  But this is the state it was in before.

     Gnome does not work yet, just gives you the black X-server screen and mouse pointer but no panels, menus, etc.