Problems

Am a fair newb running linpus lite out of the box and have had for a couple of weeks, worked fine. Now suddenly, nothing opens. Messenger won't open, none of the settings apps will open.
Because I'm a monumental fool, I don't have any kind of backup.

Any advice?

 

Does ALT-F2 still give you a 'run' dialogue, and if so can you get a console by putting 'terminal' into that dialog and pressing 'OK'?

(If nothing else, this will; let you run some sort of backup; it may also allow us to fix it!)

 

yes, that works just fine.

 

Right; first thing is to get your data backed up. Assuming all your data is within your /home/user directory (so in the usual places in the file manager - Documents, Music, Pictures etc), then in the terminal do:

Code:

cd
du -ch | grep total

This will tell you how big your home directory is; get hold of a big enough empty pen drive (probably easiest to format / empty it on another machine) and plug it in. Now do

Code:

df

and you should find an entry for /media/disk (or something very like that) which is where Linux has mounted your pen drive. To copy your files over to this pen drive do

Code:

cp -a /home/user/ /media/disk/ 

(obviously changing the /media/disk if that's not exactly wht it said on the du response).

When it's finished, you have a backup, so that's one thing out of the way.

Now, let's see what's gone wrong. We may well end up needing to do a full restore, but try this first, still in the terminal:

Code:

killall xfdesktop2
xfdesktop2

This will force your desktop to reload. Note that at this stage closing the terminal will re-close your desktop, so don't - just minimise it.

Does the desktop now work, and if not did it throw any error messages out into the terminal window?