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terdon's questions

Martin Hope
terdon
Asked: 2014-03-11 17:23:08 +0800 CST
  • 32

These are the contents of the stock ~/.profile that came with my 13.10 (commented lines removed):

if [ -n "$BASH_VERSION" ]; then
    if [ -f "$HOME/.bashrc" ]; then
    . "$HOME/.bashrc"
    fi
fi

if [ -d "$HOME/bin" ] ; then
    PATH="$HOME/bin:$PATH"
fi

This is inherited from Debian but why did Canonical decide to keep it? As far as I know, it's not the standard *nix way and I have seen various systems where this did not happen, so I assume they must have had a good reason to. This can cause unexpected behavior when running login shells (such as when sshing into the machine for example) where the user would not expect to have ~/.bashrc sourced.

The only benefit I can think of is to not confuse the user with many startup files and allow them to edit .bashrc alone and have that read irrespective of shell type. That, however, is a dubious benefit since it is often useful to have different settings for login and for interactive shells and this blocks you from doing so. Also, login shells are very often not run in a graphical environment and that can cause errors and warnings and problems (oh my!) depending on what you've set in those files.

So why does Ubuntu do this, what am I missing?

bash
Martin Hope
terdon
Asked: 2014-03-10 10:53:52 +0800 CST
  • 3

I can't get Ubuntu (tried both 12.10 and 13.10) to play nice with my VM. Everything looks fine when I log in, but trying to use the dashboard will cause a crash. The crash can be triggered by just about anything but the surest way to reproduce is to attempt to search for anything using the dashboard (top left Unity button).

When this happens, I am presented with a blank desktop:

                                         enter image description here

What I've tried:

  • I did this once while watching ~/.xsession-errors with tail -f and nothing new appeared when the crash occurred.

  • Deleting ~/.xsession-errors, rebooting and triggering the crash again, does not recreate the file.

  • I have installed guest additions on the guest OS

Details:

  • Host OS: LMDE, basically Debian testing
  • Guest OS: Ubuntu 13.10 64bit
  • Virtual Machine: 4.3.8 r92456
  • VM settings:

enter image description here enter image description here NOTE: Don't let the name fool you, I am actually running 13.10, the VM name is just left over from a previous install.

unity