[Solved] Really broke it this time

[Beinion]

I was running Minetest on Linux Mint 18.1 Cinnamon 64bit. I downloaded it using the software manager and have been running version 04.13 + repack - 1build1
Everything worked great until I added some mods and some of those mods refused to run. The game was placed in usr / share / games and I noticed that many people had the game in the home folder. When I tried to delete the mods that were causing the problem I was told I couldn't delete these files so I tried opening the games folder with root privileges and tried to move the Minetest folder to the desktop so as to place it in the home folder where I might be able to delete the mods.
Instead the folder completely disappeared! I couldn't find it in the trash, the desktop or in the games folder so I thought the best thing to do was delete the game using the menu command 'delete minetest' and then re-install it. After doing so the software manager told me Minetest had been installed but it will not start, a window tries to open and immediately closes without any message. Can anyone please help.
P.S. I noticed that a later version of the game is on the Minetest site but it says that it is from an unreliable source.

[dawgdoc]

Without going into lots of searching, the quickest way to fix this may be to go to Synaptic and re-install Minetest. (The LM modified version of Synaptic may not allow you to do this, -- I reverted to the Ubuntu version for greater useability.)

You can do similar from the command line with

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sudo apt-get purge minetest

(purge removes installed files and configuration files, whereas remove only removes installed files.

After this reinstall minetest.

If that doesn't correct your problems you can use either find or locate commands to help in tracking down if the files you originally removed are around and causing the trouble. See this page.

You didn't state which mods caused the problem, but there are any number of mods that will not work unless you or one Minetest 0.4.16 or a newer development version. The simplest way to get this on LM 18.1 is to use the Ubuntu Stable PPA - this is what I am doing as are a fair number of others on the forums. I imagine this is the source of a newer version you saw on the Minetest homepage with the warning about an unreliable source. If you are adventurous, or do not wish to install from the PPA, you could compile form source.

[Beinion]

I used the purge minetest command and tried to re-install and it still won't work.
I then tried the advanced find command with the following result:
find: ‘./.cache/dconf’: Permission denied
I then tried to use the same find command using root and got a result too long to list here as it went on forever, but heres a sample:
find: ‘/etc/cups/ssl’: Permission denied
find: ‘/run/udisks2’: Permission denied
find: ‘/run/cups/certs’: Permission denied
find: ‘/run/sudo’: Permission denied
find: ‘/run/lvm’: Permission denied
find: ‘/run/systemd/inaccessible’: Permission denied
find: ‘/run/lock/lvm’: Permission denied

The mods I installed were: Mesecons, Advance Trains, Pipeworks and Teleporters.
Yes the page you link to was the source with the warning about it being unreliable.
I'm not sure how to compile from source as I'm new to linux.
Thanks for your help

[dawgdoc]

On my system the executable is at /usr/bin/minetest. The system installed files are at /usr/share/minetest/. Finally, stuff I installed or created are at /home/dawgdoc/.minetest (mods, subgames, worlds within subgames, etc)

The package manager I mentioned earlier, Synaptic, has a tool to fix broken packages. In the toolbar open Menu > Administration > Synaptic Package Manager. Once you have entered your password and it is running go to the toolbar and click Edit. Down the list click Fix Broken Packages. It's worth the time to try this if nothing else is working.

Another option to attempt locating where the files/directories might now be is to run the two following search commands in a terminal window. The first searches for files named either minetest or Minetest. The second searches for directories with those names. I've included the results of the commands on my system.

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dawgdoc@dawgdoc-Inspiron-5555 ~ $ sudo find / -type f -iname "minetest" | grep minetest
[sudo] password for dawgdoc: 
find: ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied
/usr/share/menu/minetest
/usr/bin/minetest

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dawgdoc@dawgdoc-Inspiron-5555 ~ $ sudo find / -type d -iname "minetest" | grep minetest
find: ‘/run/user/1000/gvfs’: Permission denied
/usr/share/doc/minetest
/usr/share/minetest
/home/dawgdoc/.cache/minetest

I didn't construct this quite correctly because it is not showing /home/dawdoc/.minetest

[Beinion]

Ah this helped me a lot, I tried the search using root and found all the files that didn't show up before and deleted them. Then I did a re-install and surprisingly it worked, although without the mods my latest game had some unknown blocks such as clear glass (I think I had extra blocks mod as well but forgot to mention).
Everything is working fine now and I have learned a lot.

Thanks very much for your help on this.

[dawgdoc]

If you decide you want to update to a newer version of Minetest the launchpad page for the latest stable version is here. It can be installed with three terminal commands.

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sudo add-apt-repository ppa:minetestdevs/stable
sudo apt-get update
sudo apt-get install minetest

[Beinion]

Thanks for that I might just try that update.