Helena after Gloria

[interbird1964]

First of all, Mint is the distro I install for friends and advise anyone looking for Linux.
Secondly, I've been lazy at following the Helena development since Gloria works so good for me.
So, anything I say here is because I was too lazy to test and to give feedback about it.

But I just shrunk a Windows 7 partition on a fiends laptop to install Helena.
I used Helena because it comes with a Mozilla Prism version (more so, prism-gmail) that remembers the userid.
(Like firefox does)
(The version of Prism with Gloria is quite old and I don't know if this feature can be enabled on this old Prism)
(I know I can install an updated Prism)

I partitioned the harddisk using the Helena live-cd, but i will not go into details about this one.
I know how hard it is to suggest reasonable partitioning-schemes, more-so if there is an already present (linux) scheme.
Suffice to say that while there was a 35G primary partition ready for Helena, the proposal was to split-up a shared NTFS-partition.
So, I used manual and that worked fine.
Very cool also that Helena mentioned the Win7 usage by name.
(Why Win7 sees a swap-partition in an extended partition as primary is beyond me; but that area has never been MS's strong-hold -:)

Then I rebooted the installed system and was presented with a login that reminded me of the old X-login days.
Where's the beautiful Gloria gdm-login ?
Is this a fault of mine or has this to do with the new gdm ?
Can I get it back by installing the 2.20 (ubuntu) version in the repo ?
(Of course I can fix it, but...)

And my other dissapointment is the enourmous irritating fact that unmounting a usb-stick with the red-arrow
in Nautilus now completely removes the device. (As does the drive-mount-applet; which offers no choise at all except to eject)

You have to right-click on the Nautilus device-entry and choose unmount from the menu-popup
to have the usb-device not be unlisted from the available devices.
Irritating, not for me but for novices.

I guess this is an Ubuntu issue, or Gnome issue, but I say:
It worked like it should in Gloria.

Now the Safely Remove, which completely removes a usb-stick, together with the red-button in Nautilus
poses just question-marks for inexperienced users.
They click on the red button and the whole device dissapears !
Not good !

So, here are my questions:
- How and where can I reprogram the red-button on mounted media Nautilus do an unmount instead of a (device) remove
- How do I get the beautiful Gloria login (gdm) back

I'm very glad Ctrl-Alt-Backspace still works since you'd have to be a real live monkey to be able to press them simultaneously by accident.


Otherwise,
I love what I see and experience with Helena and I promise to ventilate stuff more earlier next time.
Mint is the only distro, IMHO, that can stand a comparison with Win7 to the untrained eye.

But let's not make the mistake that untrained eyes are monkey-eyes.
In that case there is only one button needed on the Desktop: "ShutDown".
(And it will be pressed by accident


Kudo's to all the people that worked hard to realize Mint8.
And the Giants it stands on.

Regards,
Ben from Holland.
(interbird1964@gmail.com)

[cerebellum]

Now the Safely Remove, which completely removes a usb-stick, together with the red-button in Nautilus
poses just question-marks for inexperienced users.
They click on the red button and the whole device dissapears !
Not good !

It would be nice to have a message saying the device is safe to be removed but user is not required to click it.. like a balloon message or something.

- How do I get the beautiful Gloria login (gdm) back

a bad first impression for Helena, the first impression for Gloria was glorious..

[richyrich]

For question number 2 . . .

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 44&start=0

[viking777]

You have to right-click on the Nautilus device-entry and choose unmount from the menu-popup
to have the usb-device not be unlisted from the available devices.
Irritating, not for me but for novices.

I guess this is an Ubuntu issue, or Gnome issue, but I say:
It worked like it should in Gloria.

I think this is a new 'feature' in Nautilus, because it works that way in Ubuntu 9.10 as well as you probably already know. I don't think there is much the Mint team can do about it sadly.

EDIT. Interesting to note though that it only happens with usb pen drives. I have a USB external hard drive attached which does not disappear when you click the red triangle, and I am in the process of charging up my ebook reader, and that doesn't disappear either??

[T J Tulley]

"Where's the beautiful Gloria gdm-login ?"

You can get it back via >Control Centre>Look and feel>Appearance>Background - and select. It doesn't look quite the same there, but it is the Gloria screen.

[interbird1964]

For what it's worth,
I reinstalled gdm 2.20 and got some not-so-nice side-affects.
Reinstalling 2.20 creates a /etc/pam.d/gdm-2.20 or whatever file,
but does not symlink that to gdm in that dir.
(So, replacing the new gdm, which is awful imho, does not work correctly)

If you symlink the /etc/pam.d.gdm-2.20 file to gdm in that dir it will be used.

For the theme, (Arc-Wise) it seems not to be present in any Helena package.
I could be wrong, but if I'm not, this is a huge failure with regard to Mint8.
Dunno how to upload Arc-Wise here, but it's in Gloria under: /usr/share/gdm/themes (Arc-Wise)

I'm still recovering from the change "gdmsetup" went through.
Instead of having a real configuration-manager for gdm, under Helena it just asks a stupid question
with a dialog any unborn child could make.

Dunno about this gdm-change, but it sure does not look good.

BAD !

Mint8 really misses her polish on this one, and also on the automatic login with keyring.
Mint8 should have resolved that, That is why Mint should be better than Ubuntu.

I've read some useless discussions about the desktop-background in which even Clem was involved.
Sorry to say, but I find this a waste of time.

If by now, anyone using mint is not able to change a background or theme,
then just turn of the compu and make yourself a coffee and watch some tv.


My final opinion:
Helena is not what it could have been.
It was released too short after it's base. (Karmic)
It is shallow in comparisson with Gloria and Felicia.

Sorry to say, but that's my humble opinion.



Ben.

[interbird1964]

For question number 2 . . .

http://forums.linuxmint.com/viewtopic.p ... 44&start=0

Don't know what you want to tell me with this link.
It's about having a same backdrop as the Desktop.

That is not what I am talking about.

I'm talking about the change in gdm, the laborous work in getting gdm-2.20 to work again,
which involves editing pam-files and the fact that Helena does not makes this easy.

I understand things change in Gnome-land, and/or Ubuntu, or any upstream source,
but that does not mean it's all "for the better".

In fact, Mint8--Totem cannot play movies Gloria-Totem could.
Sure, thats an "upstream" issue, but Mint is Mint because it should resolve those issues.

The fact alone that totem on older systems like mint6 or 7 plays movies ,but not on Mint8,
poses a "degeneration" to the user.
Me being one of them.

I don't care that the Totem developers choose to extinguish the xine back-end.

It does not work anymore, so f**ck Totem.

My friends and I want to play movies and Totem is about to make itself obsolete.


I vote for a working player in the next release of Gnome, because,
It should work "out-of-the-box".

As should Mint be the distro that works.
Even from live-cd.

Not the distro that *worked*.


Ben.

[cerebellum]

I vote for a working player in the next release of Gnome, because,
It should work "out-of-the-box".

As should Mint be the distro that works.
Even from live-cd.

Not the distro that *worked*.

I agree.
I have been trying to introduce Linux to friends and the main problem for them (compared to Windows) is simply working out-of-the box, especially multimedia codecs like mp3 and divx.

[Craig_Dem]

If you don't like helena, why not just use Gloria?

It is very nice and still supported. Or you could point your repos to the Karmic and Helena ones too.
Personally, I think this is better, I don't see grub because I don't dual boot and I have the timeout set to 0 so I don't have any problems there. The new kernal fixes all my problems with devices and my sound now works perfectly.

[T J Tulley]

Interbird 964 wrote:
"In fact, Mint8--Totem cannot play movies Gloria-Totem could."

Well, my installation of Mint8 plays movies in You-tube perfectly well. Admittedly I could do with a better sound system but that's my hardware. Why do some producers give a background which makes speech unintelligible?

I don't know about Totem, and I don't know about gdm - my Desktop is now like Gloria's (see my post above). BTW, the Grub menu in 'Resume after hibernation' shows with the original Helena desktop background behind it, but after the process is complete the Gloria desktop background appears, as re-set by me.

Interesting to see that someone else reported a crash half-way through installing, as I did. 

[interbird1964]

@Craig_dem:
I have several systems in Grub, from Felicia to Gloria to Helena and also Jaunty and Debian.
(No Windows though)

But I'm not about what works for me.
I'm about what "first impressions" for novice Linux users.

Just boot from the live Gloria CD and play a movie in Totem.
It works.
Now boot from the Helena live-CD and play the same movie in Totem.
It does not work.

-- x --


I am aware this is a Totem issue, and thus upstream, but if I had to have had
Helena released I'd chosen a different default player, like Gnome player.
One that actually works.

Some good news is that I'm just home after shrinking a Windows 7 parition and putting
Helena besides it.
I choose Helena because the Prism-Gmail version nicely remembers passwords, etc.
I also installed AWN to make life easy for this user.
I asked which system he wanted to boot default in Grub and he choose Mint !

I had to do some dirty work to get things going with Helena,
but I go to sleep with the warm and fuzzy feeling of one more user departing the
Win7 misexperience.

Mint rocks !


Ben.

[interbird1964]

You have to right-click on the Nautilus device-entry and choose unmount from the menu-popup
to have the usb-device not be unlisted from the available devices.
Irritating, not for me but for novices.

I guess this is an Ubuntu issue, or Gnome issue, but I say:
It worked like it should in Gloria.

I think this is a new 'feature' in Nautilus, because it works that way in Ubuntu 9.10 as well as you probably already know. I don't think there is much the Mint team can do about it sadly.

EDIT. Interesting to note though that it only happens with usb pen drives. I have a USB external hard drive attached which does not disappear when you click the red triangle, and I am in the process of charging up my ebook reader, and that doesn't disappear either??

True.
I had the same.
An external USB disk does not get removed from the list by pressing the red-arrow-button in Nautilus.
But an USB stick gets removed from the list.
I traced /proc and /sys but could not determine any device-characteristics that differ between the two.
My guess is it's a Gnome Nautilus issue and I know this same behaviour was also present in older Gnome releases (2.8?).
And I was glad it was fixed later (2.20?)
Now it's back and it's a shitty user-experience for newcomers.

Time to apt-get source nautilus to see what's goin on...
I for one do not like this behaviour; not in the least.

[Drake2k]

Helena 'looks' beautiful. Unfortunately I'll be going back to Gloria. With every Linux mint distribution I've ever used, everything on my laptop worked right out of the box. I never had to go fumbling through a million google results and ubuntu forums to try to fix anything. In Helena however, my sound isn't working. Sure, it can be fixed, but I feel that defeats the purpose of making Linux more user friendly. I would rather just reformat back to Gloria and wait for Helena to be fixed or another version to be released.

PS( this is by no means a whining session. I've been following mint for a long time. I love and appreciate all that the developers are trying to do. I install linux on a lot of clients and friend's computers.




HP nc6230

[interbird1964]

It's now some time since the release of Helena,
and I have had more experience with it.
I have not installed it for myself yet, as I have to vaporize a Jaunty install for that,
which is not a problem besides having time; but I installed Helena for friends on laptops.

I regret to say my phone keeps ringing about stuff that worked with Gloria and even Felicia.

I know there was a discussion about blending the Mint stuff in menu's with the system,
so, to not make it look like Mint specific stuff anymore,
but in practice this seems to be a counter-move decision.
My friends are missing the Mint-specific stuff and what they find is that lot's of things do
not work as they used to with Gloria.

In my humble opinion it's would be a good move to blend the Mint specific stuff,
but only if the whole user-experience would be better.

Alas, there is lots of stuff that is broken, very much that is to be "blamed" on Ubuntu.
(And possibly upstream Gnome)

But, I must say, the polish that distinguished Mint (8) from Ubuntu (9.10) is not as shiny as it was with
Gloria (Mint 7) with Ubuntu (9.04).

And my guess is lots of you people will agree with me.
That's not so say Helena is no good; as said lot's is dependent of upstream stuff.

On they other hand we must also acknowledge that the Linux Kernel is continuously
under development, as are other major parts of a Linux system; like Gnome, KDE and sound-sub-systems.

But we also have to acknowledge that a live-cd plays a major part in letting users from others systems
"get a taste of Linux".
So, any failure on such a "demonstration" is a failure for the "presentator" and for the whole community.

Gloria being able to play movies from the live-cd with Totem that Helena cannot is a failure.
Technically and for User Experience.

That's a shame and I don't think it's the right way to go.
If the Totem-people think that a user should put more efford in getting it to work, and do not provide any way
to gui such a user, I say: Remove Totem as the preferred Gnome Media Player.

For Linux to get accepted as a Desktop and Mainstream system, things have to work,
Right-Out-Of-The-Box, or right-from-live-cd.
Anything less is not accepted by such a new user and questions from more experienced users about why Mint7
plays and Mint8 does not is not what I'm waiting for.

So who can answer for me why Mint8 Totem does not play a movie Mint7 can ?

I'm very curious.

And don't you agree, that if Mint is Ubuntu++, this should have been taken care of in Helena ?
(Instead of wasting time on threads about backgrounds)


Ben.

[interbird1964]

If my name was Clem the following things would not have been in Helena:

1. The new Grub
Idiotic move on the part of Ubuntu.
No new value.
Sysadmins cannot direct users anomore by phone.
(To uncomment a few lines)
Sysadmins have to get aquinted with the new Grub first.
And commenting-out a boot-entry now takes more lines than in the old Grub.
How is that easier ?
Sure it's more poweful than the old Grub, but who needs this at this time ?
Maybe when we all have EFI-boot machines.
* Never change a winning team *
Grub legacy is the best for now.

2. The new GDM
Dunno what they want, (the GDM peoples) with this new version, but it sucks sky-high.
GDM-setup possibilities are shrunk to "Bush Junior-like" options.
(Almost none)
Not having the beautiful Gloria Login-Screen is a *real* miss.
And not being able to replace the new GDM with the old gdm-2.20 without having to edit pam-files makes you
look like a nerd in front of your audience; something you don't want on a demonstration.
*GDM 2.20 should never have been replaced in Helena.*

3. New Totem
The Totem Guys have been f**ng around more in the past.
There used to be a xine-backend and a gstreamer-backend.
On the old systems they could not be used together.
On Gloria they could and you could select the backend with the Debian alternatives system.
This is choise.
It is gone and Totem does not play.
*Totem sould have been as it was in Gloria/Felicia*

More issues ?

Later...



Ben.

[Hawkeye_52]

Sorry I am late to this party, but I have been dealing with other LinuxMint/Ubuntu problems on two different machines (check my threads if interested). Once I got them corrected, through hours and hours of cruising this Forum (no real help) and Ubuntu's (found some answers after heavy lifting), I decided that I wanted to put up a custom GDM login screen, as I had done in the past. What a joke!

Your thread (or threads really), and the one by T J Tulley, pretty well sum up the problems. I won't rehash your observations. My questions on this topic are twofold:

1. Isn't Linux Mint about customizing Ubuntu to make it more flexible and friendlier than Ubuntu? I always thought that Clem and Husse, and whatever other devs there are, were about understanding and reacting to end user preferences? The strident comments here are a strong statement that the changes 'upstream' are not useful or meaningful to many.
2. Where are the reactions from anyone from Linux Mint on this topic? So far they remain unanswered by anyone from Linux Mint. Does this mean that critical observations from end users are just ignored? Do devs from Linux Mint only involve themselves in technical questions regarding hardware/software compatibility issues?

I, too, am frustrated about what I consider the 'dumbing down' of GDM for some unknown reason. It would help if someone in authority could clarify the issue and respond to frustrations that have been repeatedly voiced in this section of the Forums.

It is tough to sound respectful when you are this frustrated, but I have spent hours and hours resolving monitor resolution and sound issues on two computers, without finding any real help here. Everything, it seems, is 'upstream'. Grrr. Clem and his cohorts have put together a fine distro, better in the past IMHO, than LM8. I am at the point where 'sit down and shut up' would be more preferable than apathetic silence. At least I would know where I stood.

Rant over....

Hawkeye_52

p.s. I have tried Meerkat's solution through installing his ppa mentioned by richyrich, and it has been overridden by Linux Mint for 3 reboots. Hope, as they say, springs eternal....