I have a problem that "corrupted" my user, let's call it olduser . I got stuck in the login screen and nothing I tried could fix it.

Luckily I had backups, but I didn't need them because the files are still all there.

The only way to login was through a new user newuser . But all my aliases and mounting places are on olduser or pointing to it (aliases). Also my ssh points to olduser .

For example, my other partitions are on /media/olduser/ , aliases point to /home/olduser/Desktop/ .

So,

My question is: how can I rename olduser to foo or whatever so that then I can rename newuser to olduser ?

If you are curious, here is my problem and some of the solutions I tried:

Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears

What to do when nothing seems to fix Ubuntu 14.10 stuck after log in?

Unity doesn't load, no Launcher, no Dash appears