Just one more update for a while...

Due to this account manager error posted earlier, the ClearOS desktop experiment is...on hold for now.

I have to reimage the machine because all of my data is on there. While I can't say exactly what caused this, if you experiment as well you might want to do this on your "play" PC rather than one with your data on it. I did get my data offloaded (FTP+FileZilla=Joy) but it's a little messier than I had expected. Maybe I will go back to experimenting in the future once I shut down an old PC of mine, but for now I have to play it safe. Well, a little safer anyway.

Thanks all

Ah, yes thanks for the info Tim...I had found Dave's posting farther down this page on Sunday and went through all of the steps. For whatever reason, it looked like it had worked fine but the error still persists. When I check the 'status', I still had that same error message and could only login as root.

I say "had" in the past, because all of my data is on this server I had to do something drastic (i.e. quick). In this case, I started up FileZilla on the PC and installed the FTP app through the marketplace. Then, I was able to sftp login as root and transfer all of my data off the server to various sources here for a future reimage.

It's one of those things where I would have liked to figure this one out, but didn't have a lot of time left to experiment.

If someone else reads this in the future and need to FTP off your data, just a tip that you have to secure FTP connect and (optionally) check the feature in FileZilla to preserve the file date/time in case that's valuable to you. You won't get the folder dates/times, but the file datestamps are carried over.

So, this problem appears to affect more services.

This morning when I booted up my Windows computer, none of the file shares work. (It did last night when I wrote that prior info). Maybe I can install FTP and re-download everything back off via the root login so I can reimage, unless someone knows how to get the "account system back online" today. I'll keep looking...

Some more info...it might be more helpful to everyone if I copy/paste the entire output below (I'll substitute my computer's name with * to make it shorter and a little less public of course):

I noticed that this error in the OP had occurred to me tonight when I went to add a new user. I'm on 7.1.0 and also trying to install the GUI interface in another post, but I don't think the two are related. Maybe something happend to ldap.

I have followed the instructions below and everything works fine until I get to the last item, i.e. restarting the slapd service. Then I get the error:



So...not sure if this process applies 100% to 7.1.0 as well but the services web page shows that slapd is running but 'service slapd status' says it's not.



Any ideas here on how to fix this? I also did a remove/reinstall of openLDAP from the marketplace but that didn't help either.

Attila Horvath wrote:

There are two servers. Both COS 6.5 runs, one of which did not cause any problems for the update.

The other server rebooted 2-3 times, did not help.
In the linked topic, ricky's # 57553 comments I found the solution:



Everything is working well!

The Iface.php was not modified anything.
(I'm sorry my poor english.)

There might be another reason for this breaking...I went to add a new user in tonight and found the "account manager is offline". I'm reading another thread here to see if I can get that working first. Once it starts back up again, maybe that is part of the problem.

https://www.clearos.com/clearfoundation/social/community/account-system-is-offline/latest

Ok...here's where I'm at trying to get "easylife" to work.

When I download and try to install it with rpm, it gave me a bunch of dependencies that were missing. So I installed the following...

yum install usermode usermode-gtk yad

Then, I tried installing again with no dependencies (so it gets past the Fedora check):

rpm --nodeps -i easylife-4.4-1.noarch.rpm

Ah, it "looks" like it works...it's in the system menu anyway.

When I tried it, it comes back with an error that there is no regular user found and it shouldn't be run as root. Fine, I'll logout and go into one of my other accounts.

So, I login a regular account and try running it; a pop-up states that I am doing something that needs the root password. Ok, I enter that. Once I hit enter, it comes back with the same error message that there's "No regular user found..." even though I'm logged in as a regular user. There's an error message back in the console:

"GtkDialog mapped without a transparent parent. This is discouraged."

When I surfed around the Internet I found another posting that says gksu needs to be installed, but it's not a known package so with some additional surfing someone said to install beesu instead. I did, and no luck. So I removed beesu.

Anyone have an idea on how to get easylife to work so I can get all of these background drivers and services installed? I could also try and install this all manually (by all, I mean at least the nvidia, sound, and flash emulator) but if this is something trivial that is broken it does in fact sound like an "easy" way to get the missing parts installed from a desktop environment.

Thanks!

The quick summary is...it works!

I came here after an older post of mine when I tried to do this under 6.3 and 6.7, and Tim sent me here. Now that I've reimaged the server with 7.1 and have a new video card (GTX 960) I decided to give this a go. I haven't done the VNC install yet, but that brings me to two questions.

1. Tim suggested a few add'l packages to add below (like Thunderbird "is a must") and I'd like to add VLC from videolan.org which I also consider a "must add". Now that we have a GUI, is there a GUI package manager that I can download and install now so I don't have to manually download everything and 'yum install'? i.e. a full Gnome or KDE desktop would have this.

2. While trying different Linux packages (I use Linux Mint on two old desktops) I came across a nice installation package for Fedora that installs all of the background missing stuff that you'd need on a typical desktop, except the GUI installer that I mentioned above. It's at http://easylifeproject.org if you'd like to see what I mean.

ClearOS isn't Fedora I know. ClearOS is based on CentOS, which comes from RedHat that spins off Fedora as a desktop environment. So, I'm crossing my fingers that all of this stuff can be installed to bring ClearOS up to an easy media server with light web surfing, i.e. streaming online video as well.

I did install the nvidia .run drivers off their web site on ClearOS 6.7 before reinstalling 7.1. That was a bit of work; you have to install gcc and also kernel-devel in order for the nvidia install to create a new kernel, and this would have to be manually run again after every Kernel upgrade. It did work somewhat as I was able to run Folding at Home on the video card but it only worked with Core 21. The others would crash.

If I can get the full driver set to work, I really only use this server as a file server and may be able to install Steam for example to run a few Linux games. This is pretty much uncharted territory on ClearOS I know and getting off topic. Once I get the GUI fully setup (questions 1 and 2) if all goes well, I'll start a new thread.

Thanks Dave & Tim!

A quick follow-up here before work...maybe ClearOS will end up being the best choice after all. I'll give it a try after work.

It seems that openSUSE can't find my boot partition after a reboot and Fedora doesn't like my nvidia card at all...it installs but hangs on boot.

So the community might be the best; I need a file server first and a GUI second. If I get that working after all and have future questions I'll just post as a new 7.x thread since Dave's looking for feedback anyway.

Thanks

Ah; ok thanks Tim. I've been trying various Linux distros here the last two days to see what actually works. ClearOS has been nice because the web interface is so good you don't really need a monitor until you want a monitor and then it's a little tougher.

Linux Mint I've used on other systems, but it won't boot up natively and support the raid controller I happen to have on this motherboard. I tried both openSUSE Leap and Fedora--both of those do work and have their own advantages. I'll keep experimenting a bit here as I'm sure ClearOS 7.x will also work fine; it just comes down to what I need/want to do with this computer in the future.

Thanks for the link too; I'll bookmark both this and the 7.x GUI install page for future use. Maybe someday, there will be an "app for that" too. Sorry.