Installation problems with Mint 13 KDE 64 bit

[poldie]

I've just changed from Mint 12 LXDE 32 bit to Mint 13 KDE 64 bit. So far I'm very happy with it - it looks great and is for the most part very intuitive (in terms of configuring shortcuts, display config etc). But having installed it on 3 systems (powerful desktop, decent laptop, older laptop) and had the exact same experience each time I'm wondering if something has changed in the image currently available for download, whether if it affects everyone and people are suffering silently (but are experienced enough to deal with it by themselves), or perhaps I'm just unlucky.

1) An error about not finding contacts somewhere like /home/USERNAME/.local/contacts. If you create this folder then it's fine, but why is this happening? Can't the installer create it?

2) Updates are available, namely `mintupdate`, but you go to update it and it hangs. ps shows that it's waiting for a password, I think, but I never see the prompt. I kill it and then try again but I get the same problem. I resorted to using terminal and doing update then upgrade, which works (but see below).

3) Having to resort to running update/upgrade on the command line I get confronted with options about whether I should go with the current files or the newer ones from the upgrade. I have no idea which ones to use - how would I? I opted for the new ones, on the grounds that I'm upgrading to a newer version of some software, and it's a fresh install so I have no older/legacy config to maintain. Seems a bit unnecessary though.

4) KWallet keeps popping up, for all users, asking for credentials. Sometimes I get a similar popup asking about secrets. If I click cancel it goes away but I'm not on the wifi. It seems that, unlike every other linux distro I've used, each user must provide credentials for wifi. After playing with this a little, I decided to just disable kWallet, and this was fine (once I'd logged onto each account individually and entered the wifi password one more time so that it could be, I'm guessing, stored in the usual place. But even disabling kwallet was something I had to do for each user, and not via the admin account. Did I miss a trick here or is this the only way to do this?

5) Sometimes, dragging widgets to the panel causes a crash to occur. I've not yet managed to wade through all the screens needed to actually submit a report - it seems a lot harder work than reporting crashes on, say, Android. This has happened on two of the three machines, more than once. It would have been one of the built in widgets on a machine where it's unlikely any other software would have been installed.

I guess I'm a sort of intermediate level in terms of Linux, so its not been too much of a problem resolving these issues, but I never had anything like this much trouble within an hour of installing other distros, including previous versions of Mint.

[claudecat]

I've never run into any of the issues you mention, aside from once having trouble using mintupdate after a fresh install. The reasons for this are as follows:
1. First thing I do in any KDE distro install is go into systemsettings and disable desktop search and kwallet entirely (among other things). I also go into akonadi configuration and stop the server. I believe all this would render your issues 1 and 4 moot.
2. I never use mintupdate (learned my lesson after that one failed attempt). I go to cli and apt-get install synaptic, then use that for all future updates etc. This step addresses issues 2 and 3
3. I've never had issues with dragging widgets to the panel (I only use the one main panel), but I have only added a few that way - the icon-only task manager and the system load viewer. What I find real handy is to add launchers to the panel by way of the right-click menu once a given application is running (Show a launcher when not running).

Hope this helps or at least informs

[poldie]

I've never run into any of the issues you mention, aside from once having trouble using mintupdate after a fresh install. The reasons for this are as follows:
1. First thing I do in any KDE distro install is go into systemsettings and disable desktop search and kwallet entirely (among other things). I also go into akonadi configuration and stop the server. I believe all this would render your issues 1 and 4 moot.
2. I never use mintupdate (learned my lesson after that one failed attempt). I go to cli and apt-get install synaptic, then use that for all future updates etc. This step addresses issues 2 and 3
3. I've never had issues with dragging widgets to the panel (I only use the one main panel), but I have only added a few that way - the icon-only task manager and the system load viewer. What I find real handy is to add launchers to the panel by way of the right-click menu once a given application is running (Show a launcher when not running).

Hope this helps or at least informs

Thanks for that. The update manager is something I've used for years under Ubuntu and Mint - this is the first real problem I've had with it. Any reason you use Synaptic instead?

[claudecat]

I like Synaptic because it just plain works and I've become very familiar with its behavior in using Ubuntu and Debian over the years. My typical usage is to show packages in categories like installed, all available, upgradable, auto-removable, etc, by clicking on the "Status" button on the left. This makes it easy to see which packages need which actions. For example, if I want to remove older kernels taking up space, I can look under "installed" and find them (linux-image) and remove what I want to.

In day to day use, it's basically a 3 step process:
1 - Click on the Refresh button leftmost on the top toolbar to update all your repositories
2 - Click on the Mark All Upgrades button - Mint makes this more difficult by removing this button, so I click on Upgrades in the left pane, then select all (ctl+a) and right-click/Mark for upgrade the whole list.
3 - Click apply/ok to let apt do its thing and you're done.

Supposedly Mint feels that using mintupdate is safer than the above, hence their removal of the button, but I've never EVER had an issue with doing this, and I've been a Mint user since Felicia (6). My opinion of mintupdate is purely based on it not working properly the one and only time I used it. It probably works ok for the day to day stuff, just not for the gigantic set of updates I was doing after an install of one release or another.

edit:
I just want to add that your issue with mintupdate may be due to the fact that Mint released 13 KDE in a state that required a MASSIVE amount of updates immediately upon installation. I installed it on the day it was released, and it was hundreds of mb of stuff - including the kernel (it shipped with the original 'buntu 12.04 kernel if I recall correctly - woefully out of date by that time). Mint's a great distro, but that was a huge mistake in my opinion.