Linux Mint 6 Fluxbox RC1 Bug Thread

[clem]

This thread is dedicated to bug reports on Linux Mint 6 Fluxbox RC1. Please report bugs here and include necessary steps to reproduce the problems you describe.

Clem.

[tawan]

cunning (good thing not bug)
Having the task bar at 90% of the screen width means that even when you have full screen stuff you can still right click the desktop to bring up the menu. Clever.
(of course there is the keyboard shortcut too)

Minor Ones
Some dark themes can show grey text on a white background (especially noticeable in mintconfig. (also skype as it is not themed))

Is Package Manager only accessible via mintconfig? If it is not in the menu and I can't see it then it would be handy in the menu.

I would like CTRL+ALT+Arrow to scroll desktops. (the task bar arrows are good, ALT+number is usefull, but CTRL+ALT+Arrow is instinct)

I will need to stop the trackpad on my laptop changing desktops as it happens unwelcomly.

It seems? to be sharing a Trash with my Gnome Mint? Not sure if this is bad or brilliant yet..

Music loop? (not bug?)
I uncommented;

Code: Select all

#remove the stupid music loop link
rm $HOME/Music/Music

Is this the thing that gives you a music folder with a never ending recursion of music shortcuts? Or what is this?

Praise (not bug)
Very nice looking, well polished, lots of nice alternate themes, great icon choice. Nice work on the menu, the look feel and so are very right.

I will now go deeper into the system and do some menu editing and so on...

love it.

[.ee]

I don't know if it is bug or a hardware specific glitch. I was not using other flavors of Mint on the notebook I am testing Fluxbox Mint now.

Strangely, (sometimes?) when I am trying to regulate brightness, the CPU usage suddenly blows to 100% (60% firefox, 40% thunar), one cannot kill FM window, cannot tape commands in xterm... The problem lasts longer than I am able to wait to see if the system settles itself, so after 5-10 mins I just reboot.

The system has enough memory and speed (640M, 1GHz) to run smoothly and, moreover, how changing the brightness
with Fn-Up can be related to the increase of CPU usage (xorg problem??)? The problem seems to be reproducible, as it happened already several times.

[tawan]

Some graphics glitch with changing wallpapers too often in Nitrogen.

Also seems to happen to me most when I click on "Linux_Mint_Balls_by_jernau.png" (file added by me to usr/share/backgrounds)

All gets undrawn from the screen leaving only Nitrogen and the apply button, then as empty space is moused over the elements are drawn back onto the screen. Changing desktop again fixes it.



Not bug
The easy adjusting of menu and window transparency is very nice

[tawan]

I'm not sure how to unmount my USB drive by GUI - "eject volume" does the "data writing to disk" message but then seems to remount the disk straight away.

[infamous]

Unable to use ndiswrapper to connect to the internet with ath5k card. Works fine in main edition 6.0. In fluxbox I can setup the drivers fine but wicd will not see a connection. Tried rebooting several times. Tried manual ndiswrapper -i filename.ini && ndiswrapper -m and all that good stuff but doesn't work. Splash screen looks nice though

[Husse]

phonicboom has already mentioned it, but I'll also touch on it
While it looks very nice greyish text on a black background (the default) is no good for the visually impaired
None of my three visually impaired sons would see anything but a completely black screen
Of course you can select another theme.
Apart from that I say great work shane

[shane]

Thanks for the feedback! Is anyone else facing the same problems as .ee with Brasero?

Thanks for this long-awaited release!


Somehow I was unable to burn rewritable CD using brasero (the same problem I reported on xfce edition).

The workoround for me was: install xfburn, sudo umount /media/cdrom0, blank cd-rw using xfburn,
open file to burn in xfburn, burn. Brasero did not want to burn the disk even after I have blanked it using xfburn. In the latest Mint Gnome edition I don't have these problems. Xfburn workes flawlessly in Crunchbang Linux. Maybe it makes sense to replace Brasero in Mint Fluxbox edition with xfburn?
Or, maybe I am just not qualified enough to use Brasero properly???


PS: If I made apt-get update and upgrade today on the version I have dowloaded few days ago,
do I have the today's release version? Upgrade has produced the following message:

The following packages have been kept back:
linux-generic linux-headers-generic linux-image-generic
linux-restricted-modules-generic

Is it normal?

[Husse]

Well, I got a problem with Brasero 0.9.1 in main (the 0.8 in original Intrepid is useless crap - it can't burn an ISO correctly)
I did burn a useless DVD-RW twice (got no kernel image found) so I burned with the gnome app - was OK
Possibly not a Fluxbox problem
But I'm convinced that I burned a KDE CE pre RC with the same Brasero and OK

[shane]

- 90% width of the slit... yes that was the plan

- The dark GTK theme: I decided to change the theme to bring a fresh face to this edition. We had been using the same theme for 2 releases (which is still included in this release). The current theme is a modified Elfin2 theme. The original is even darker. The thing is the same color of the problematic text is rendered on both the white and the black backgrounds... which is why gray is used. If anyone more experienced in GTK theming can modify it so that black text goes on white backgrounds and white text on black backgrounds please let me know how to fix this. I really like this theme and it goes very well with the modified Elfin2 style for Fluxbox. I don't want to change it... but I will if need be. Maybe some suggestions for an alternate theme that goes well with with the Fluxbox style and the icon theme? I want this edition to look stunning!

- Synaptic is accessible in System Tools>Synaptic Package Manager, mintInstall is in the root menu and also in System Tools.

- I tried to keep keyboard shortcuts to a minimum, including only the ones that people would expect to find... like Alt+Tab, Alt+F4, etc and a few others (e.g. Ctrl+M) which would be easier to remember. The users can then compliment these with whatever suits them. The Ctrl+Alt+Arrow shortcut sounds good... and is probably worth adding. Does anyone second this? Also, does anyone else want to disable the switch desktop on mouse wheel scroll?

- Common Trash: If you are using the same partition for your home folder this should be normal. Also I think partitions have a hidden folder in the root of the partition for Trash. If this is causing any problems, let me know.

- Looping Music folder link: Are you getting this link in your Music folder which links back to your Music folder? Deleting this link was required in the Elyssa release... but I changed the way the link is created and i thought it solved the problem. I have not had this link appear on my system. Does it appear on your installations with this line commented out?

- High CPU usage when changing brightness: Since you are using keyboard shortcut it might be an xorg problem... but can you try disabling xcompmgr from the Fluxbox startup and try again? Delete or comment out the following lines like this in the Fluxbox startup file:

Code: Select all

#start xcompmgr if direct rendering is enabled
#var=`glxinfo | grep rendering`
#if [ "$var" = "direct rendering: Yes" ]
#then
#   xcompmgr -f -c -I 0.1 -O 0.1 &
#fi

- Nitrogen and graphic glitches: please try to disable xcompmgr as above... Does this solve the problem?

- For the brightness and Nitrogen problem: Please give more info on what hardware you are running on (Graphic cards, etc) and also if you are using proprietary drivers or not.

- Unmounting of USB drives: Is anyone else having this problem? I am not having this problem. Is the Thunar daemon running in the Fluxbox startup? Look for this in ~/.fluxbox/startup:

Code: Select all

#run thunar daemon for volume management
Thunar --daemon &

- Atheros wireless card: We had problems with this card in the last release as well... I really dont know what's going on here... Does your card show up in the System Tools>Hardware Drivers tool? On your first boot did you get a dialog in the system tray about available drivers for your wireless card? Does anyone else have a solution for this?

Thanks for the feedback!

[shane]

- Linux kernel packages held back: I locked the kernel packages during the building of the ISO because upgrading them breaks the LiveCD. They do not show up in mintUpdate so it just never caught my attention... But you can upgrade the kernel packages if you wish by unlocking them in aptitude and then updating and upgrading... or by using Synaptic.

- Brasero: Hm... my experience with Brasero has been better than with xfburn in the past. I haven't burn't a disk with this current version yet (hardware issues) but I will try on another machine. Is there a general consensus that xfburn works better than Brasero? Please install the latest version from here and see if it fixes the problem.

http://www.getdeb.net/app/Brasero


- I was wondering... how did you guys like the Live CD and the effort to make it lighter? Was it easy to understand and navigate? Did things work as expected for you? Really no problems with LiveCD? Is no news good news?

[.ee]

I tried to comment the lines in ~/.fluxbox/startup as you pointed out, but it did not help (both before and after rebooting).

In fact, I have established that the actual problem is not that CPU usage grows to 100% after I try to regulate the brightness with Fn-Up (which is the only way on this notebook). Actually, it does not happen if I try to regulate brightness immediately after the rebooting. What happens is that the keyboard seems to be locked after this operation: I cannot tape anything in xterm or in the open browser.
I can only navigate with the touchpad.

I also would like to change the desktop setup:

(1) to make the windows decorations and boarder thinner. Even if I chose fonts as small as 7px, the decorations are still too thick for me (they just occupy too much on space on desktop). By "decorations" I mean e.g. the place where "Terminal" and " File | Edit | View | Term | ..." are written in Termninal. And by boarder I mean the 2(?) px thick frame around every open window. I would reduce it to 1 px.

(2) I would prefer small (8 px) fonts in the menu and, respectively, to reduce the broadness of the menu by 25%. The broad menu popups are especially unconvinient when one clicks to "System Tools" and get the list of multiple entries popping out. It would be nice to structure these entries somehow.

(3) I like to use black desktop, but the dark grey default colour of the menu popup is slightly depressive. I have switched to the qnx-photon style, but it is too brigght for me. Another fluxbox distribution - Antix (Mepis) seems to have better designed fluxbox themes (with smaller fonts and narrower popups).

Please point me out the configuration files I can edit to customize my fluxbox settings?

(4) Imho, conky is too broad and takes too much space on the desktop, but I am able to change it myself in the conky's config file.

(5) Are there monitoring tools for fluxbox' panel which are similar to Gnome's.
I would prefer to have the information about processor and hard disk load, temperatures, network activity, memory usage and the home partition free space to be in the panel, or at least to be presented in a way which does not take much desktop space as Conky does.

[FedoraRefugee]

- I was wondering... how did you guys like the Live CD and the effort to make it lighter? Was it easy to understand and navigate? Did things work as expected for you? Really no problems with LiveCD? Is no news good news?

I am angry! I do not have one single bad thing to say about it...Not yet anyway!

I have not installed yet but running live is an absolute joy. It is quick and very easy to understand and navigate. Everything is as expected. I wish I had an old computer to really test it on, but alas, I have nothing with less than 1GB RAM laying around.

Good job Shane, I will be putting this on my big desktop in place of Gentoo/Fluxbox just as soon as I get the time. I will use the install only option and let you know how it goes.

edit: Oh, really nice move on Slim. It is so good to get away from GDM.

[shane]

- I dont think using smaller fonts is appropriate as some users have already brought up readability issues. I think fonts as small as 7px will be too small especially at larger resolutions. The default Fluxbox style's border has been reduced to 0px. You will have to modify the styles or add properties you want to add to all styles in the ~/.fluxbox/overlay file. Look up the Fluxbox documentation for more details: http://fluxbox.sourceforge.net/docbook.php

The qnx-photon style you mentioned looks very dated IMO and it doesn't go well with the elegant look I am trying to achieve.

- It sounds like your keyboard problem is X related. Can you give us more details about your hardware?

- Any second opinions about Conky?

- Another monitoring tool that you may want to look at is gkrell. It may suit your needs better.

- @FedoraRefugee: looking forward to your feedback!

[.ee]

I have installed the latest brasero 0.9.1 deb package and librasero-media0 it comes with.

I could not see any improvements with burning CD rewritables. The same problem with a mounted CD persists. I have to unmount it manually, and then brasero still doesn't provide me with the option to blank it or to burn it (In Gnome version it is done together with one click).

So, again, I had to unmount cd disk manually, use xfburn to blank it, and then burn it.

Though, xfburm seems to work better, it is not exactly a solution in the Mint's way to replace brasero with it,
because one has to unmount CD-RW manually before blanking and burning. It should be implemented in the
on-click way as in the Gnome version (unmount+optionally blank+burn).

Next week I will have a dvd burner back in order to test how the writing of DVD-RWs works.

@shane, please tell me know which details on my hardware would you need or which file you want me to post? It is Latitude X300 notebook with German KB. I agree the fluxbox design is a matter of taste and it is probably my job to edit it for me. I also agree that qnx-photon style doesn't fit to your fluxbox design. Maybe you could just try replacing the grey background with something in a lighter-grey-and-green or blue mixture, or let the professional designers speak out. 7px fonts is, of course, not every man's thing, but (imo) 9 or 10 px would do it better than 12 (I guess, you are using 12 px in the menu, don't you?). However, if there are people who like it this way, then let it stay as it is.

[.ee]

Maybe it helps to localize the problem with the locked keyboard after I hit Fn-Up to change the brightness:
the problem disappears after I go to suspend to RAM with Fn-Esc (still works in this locked up situation) and wake up.

[tawan]

The dark GTK theme: I want this edition to look stunning!
It looks stuning, but some color issues, not killers but something to have in mind

- Synaptic is accessible in System Tools>Synaptic Package Manager, mintInstall is in the root menu and also in System Tools.
Yep found it have also added it to "custom-menu-entries" for easy assess
i note you must have a character break (return) at the end of a line or the item is not added to the menu e.g.

Code: Select all

 [exec] (Sound Mixer) {xfce4-mixer} <>
[exec] (Package Manager) {gksu /usr/sbin/synaptic} <>
>>> there must be an empty line here or the previous entry will not show in the menu <<<


- Common Trash:
no worries, just noticed it.

- Looping Music folder link: Does it appear on your installations with this line commented out?
Yes, odd eh? maybe as I removed all the folders and have a common Data partition mounted into Home? (so all my distros share the same documents)

- Nitrogen and graphic glitches: please try to disable xcompmgr as above... Does this solve the problem?
Seems to yes, and after playing with all the options I reverted to the clean crisp default settings after all.

- Unmounting of USB drives: Is anyone else having this problem? I am not having this problem. Is the Thunar daemon running in the Fluxbox startup? Look for this in ~/.fluxbox/startup:

Code: Select all

#run thunar daemon for volume management
Thunar --daemon &

present and problem still persists

I tried all the settings in "System Tools > Removable Drives and Media" and no luck, maybe "Eject Volume" is the wrong method?
Maybe I am doing something wrong, it says "Failed to eject 1TB volume, an unknown error occured" - but the drive is unmounted.

Thanks for the feedback!
Thanks for all the hard work, this is the most interesting Linux setup I have used. With the default look and feel requiring no real tweaking. Looking good!

[tawan]

Colour Schemes.

I have been experimenting and searching the web, The most visible colour against Black and White is a dark pinky red.

If it must be gray then it should be a mid tone just to the bright side of middle to show on both white and black. (The current one then is too feint/light)

[mintph]

machine:
Compaq Presario V3000 3gb RAM, 2.0 GHZ, Intel Centrino Duo

might be a bug:
1) Right-clicked on the digital clock
2) Clicked on "Edit Clock Format"

the "Edit Clock Format" console just got stuck on the screen. if i move it, it creates another copy of it.

don't know how to remove it from the screen.

[tawan]

machine:
Compaq Presario V3000 3gb RAM, 2.0 GHZ, Intel Centrino Duo

might be a bug:
1) Right-clicked on the digital clock
2) Clicked on "Edit Clock Format"

the "Edit Clock Format" console just got stuck on the screen. if i move it, it creates another copy of it.

don't know how to remove it from the screen.

There may be other ways but;
click on it and press ESC