Thank you for replying - though this is not info that helps me in my quest !! If you sincerely wish to know what has brought me to this point, please have a look at the rather lengthy story... Here: https://forums.mydigitallife.net/threads/a-system76-tale-of-woe.74300/ For myself, usually, I always use Ubuntu Mate as it is my preferred distro & flavour. As it happens, I did a little experiment in using a manually modified Aptik backup from the machine we've decided to get rid of because of defective h/w. This was restored on top of a fresh installation of Ubuntu Mate 16.04 LTS. It worked quite well & solved the problem - by NOT creating it to begin with !!