[ubuntu-za] Quantal chaos

[Raoul Snyman]

On Tue, 11 Dec 2012 00:49:12 +0200, Jan Greeff <jan at verslank.net> wrote:
> Hi everybody, now, in addition to Skype, my Firefox also does not 
> launch. The system tells me Firefox is already running, but it's not. I 
> tried uninstalling, reboot and re-install, same result: Firefox is 
> already running.

That would be because Firefox creates a "lock" file in its configuration
in your home directory, and uninstalling and reinstalling do not affect the
configuration, only Firefox itself. In 90% of cases, uninstalling and
reinstalling an application is not going to fix a problem.

When I have a problem with something, one of the first things I do is to
move the configuration so that I can start the program with a clean slate.
Then it usually works fine and I migrate what settings I have to the new
configuration. Yes, it can be a bit of a pain, but at least I don't go
reinstalling my entire operating system over a silly configuration-related
issue.

I don't have any issues with Quantal, nor any huge issues with previous
versions of Ubuntu (well, Kubuntu actually), and I've only done upgrades
for the last 5 or 6 releases. The last time I had to do a complete
reinstall was when I migrated from 32-bit to 64-bit.

-- 
Raoul Snyman, B.Tech IT (Software Engineering)
Saturn Laboratories
m: 082 550 3754
e: raoul.snyman at saturnlaboratories.co.za
w: www.saturnlaboratories.co.za
b: blog.saturnlaboratories.co.za