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.

     Zorin is back online but crippled.  Presently the only working window managers are LXDE and Mate.  Only bash is installed and only a handful of applications.  I am working on restoring the rest.  If there is something you need, please e-mail me at support@eskimo.com and I will prioritize getting it back online.

     I was attempting to repartition Zorin but gparted blew up and scribbled the partition table.  So I restored from backups and tried again, same thing.  Something seems to be hurt with the partition table even on backups so I am doing a fresh install.  If there is software on Zorin that you use please e-mail nanook@eskimo.com and I will prioritize getting that re-installed.  No user data will be lost.

     I apologize, this work is taking longer than I expected.  Zorin will be down for probably another 1-1/2 hours.  MxLinux and Ubuntu are both very similar so please consider using one of those hosts in the interim.

     I am taking the shell server zorin.eskimo.com down for approximately 1/2 hour to change some configuration details that will make it a bit more resource efficient.