All it's doing is checking how many lines containing 'load average' uptime produced. So it's just testing if you can use sudo. But I've not seen this technique before. And as bgstack15 said "sudo -l /actual/command/to/run ; echo $?" is probably better, it should not fail if you can run uptime but can't run the actual command.

Chris

Can you ssh onto the new system from your old system? That would enable you to read dmesg, /var/log/messages, etc to see if they say anything useful without having to enter commands blind. And to update files on the new system if necessary.

Chris

Before setting up a user called pi you could try ln -s /home/chris /home/pi (replace chris with your id). It probably needs to run as root to update /home.

If it doesn't work delete it before trying to set up a user called pi. Or "interesting" things might happen.

Chris

Assuming the network is working run ifconfig on the new system (or /sbin/ifconfig if not running as root). That should tell you what IP address it has. Then ssh to that IP address from the system you are posting from. That should get round DNS not being set up. You may need to start sshd on the new system and/or update the firewall on it to allow ssh connections. Reply "yes" when ssh says it doesn't know the host key.

Then you can run commands on it and post output from them here (include the command itself in your post).

Chris

You might need to install torbrowser-launcher (or one of the other suggested packages)?

I've never used tor so that's just a guess based on it's name.

Chris

You can use lsinitramfs to list the contents of an initrd.img. Also check the man page for unmkinitramfs (that's a script to extract content from an initramfs image). And other related commands.

An old trap is to update something in initramfs and reboot without rebuilding your initramfs (the update gets ignored). I found this the hard way getting CUDA working.

Chris

I've just tried copying the two sample logs you gave above and running awk against them and get 3 both times:

chris@rigel:~/ecm-3031$ cat cupslog1 
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 3 [27/Nov/2018:16:41:51 -0300] 1 1 - localhost
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 3 [27/Nov/2018:16:42:00 -0300] 2 1 - localhost
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 4 [05/Dec/2018:08:29:39 -0300] 1 1 - localhost
chris@rigel:~/ecm-3031$ awk '/groucho/{pages += $7} END {print pages}' cupslog1 
3
chris@rigel:~/ecm-3031$ cat cupslog2 
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 13 [27/Nov/2018:16:41:51 -0300] 1 1 - localhost
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 13 [27/Nov/2018:16:42:00 -0300] 2 1 - localhost
Samsung_M2020_Series groucho 14 [05/Dec/2018:08:29:39 -0300] 1 1 - localhost
chris@rigel:~/ecm-3031$ awk '/groucho/{pages += $7} END {print pages}' cupslog2 
3

So I can't see what's going wrong for you.

Chris

That's probably the wrong architecture. Unless your system is very old you want a 64-bit executable.

Post output from uname -a which will tell us what sort of system you are running on, and what OS it runs.

Also post output from ls -ld ~/Desktop/palemoon/palemoon so we can see what permissions it has.

Chris

You should be able to boot off a live CD (or equivalent), su/sudo to root, mount the hard disk and chroot to it. That should get you into the new system as root, where you could reset passwords as desired. Then you could reboot and log on normally to investigate it. But I've not had to do it myself so I'm not sure if I've missed a step.

Or you could just back up the hard disk from the live system, eg over the network to one of your existing systems.

Or use the live system to edit /etc/shadow on the new system to set the root password hash to the same as on a system where you know the root password.

Chris

Are there tabs instead of spaces in your /etc/apt/sources.list ? Or any other strange characters?

If you can't see anything post output from od -xc /etc/apt/sources.list here (it will be a bit lengthy).

Chris

Also try lspci | grep -i NVIDIA followed by lspci -v -s 01:00 (replace 01:00 with the first 5 chars of output from the first command). That should show what kernel driver is in use. Post output here if you are not sure what it means.

Also search the forum for CUDA. I had a lot of "fun" getting it working on my system and posted details of what I had to do. They should help.

Chris

Does lightdm read the user's groups when it starts up and cache them (thus missing groups if LDAP isn't fully up then)? That's the only thing I can think of that would explain why restarting lightdm would make it start working.

Can you delay lightdm starting until after LDAP, wicd, etc are fully initialiased?

Chris