Help With Help

[WillieCee]

Hello All,

I am green as most of these screens
cleaned a drive
d/l iso checked the dl m5sum thing following the user guide
burnit checked that with disk verifier utility on the Dvd Boot menu it checked out
booted live and installed on clean hdd all is working well
LM11/64 got it booting from hdd using grub took some work (needed a little primer of grubbing in the user guide)

needless to say I have a ton of questions about this and that, so my first path is to check the apps help file on the menu all apps have one right well the options there in most programs preinstalled from the dvd but none of them work I get a red box on a gray screen says (1st line)Could not display help (2nd Line) The specified location is not supported and a Ok button to close the error box this is happening system wide even help file for the calculator won't load. Tried searching help for help on help and even Fred should agree there are some searches that will just not work and this is one of them.

Is there some utility I can run to verify the Hdd install is as it should be, 5lbs of that magic fairy dust you type in terminal would be nice to cheers.

Thanks everyone
~willie

[xenopeek]

I have the same issue on LM11 64 bits. I just checked, and both calculator and text editor help gives me this error. The good news is, you didn't do anything wrong with the installation and your installation is not broken. But why doesn't the help work? No clue...

[VeryNewToMint]

I have the exact same problem with HELP running LM11 64-bit. "Could not display help: The specified location is not supported"

[lmintnewb]

Thinking LM and users experiencing these joys can tip their hat to canonical ... aka: Ubuntu ... buntu has a tendency to cook up bugginess apparently. With the 1/2 baked software they pump out at breakneck speeds. Wish buntu would hurry up and die or summin, lol. Get off Debians jock and let some good linux distro's have a turn in the spot light for a change.

[xenopeek]

Thinking LM and users experiencing these joys can tip their hat to canonical ... aka: Ubuntu ... buntu has a tendency to cook up bugginess apparently. With the 1/2 baked software they pump out at breakneck speeds. Wish buntu would hurry up and die or summin, lol. Get off Debians jock and let some good linux distro's have a turn in the spot light for a change.

Shees, easy with the bashing I'll install LMDE already (Uh, once the respin is done...)

[lmintnewb]

lol ... nothing against you o course. Just have a real budding dislike for ubuntu.

[Bob E]

This is also happening on the 32bit version as well. I don't know if anyone has submitted a bug fix, but I'm sure this will be resolved soon.

Thinking LM and users experiencing these joys can tip their hat to canonical ...

Sounds like a good topic for Chat!

[VeryNewToMint]

I found something that may be applicable?
https://bugs.launchpad.net/yelp/+bug/695260
I uninstalled Yelp through the Software Manager, and then re-installed it, but there was no change. The "About" feature works on all the Help menus I've tried, but the actual Help or "Contents" does not work. This is a fresh installation on a brand new computer. The only thing unusual I've done is to use a Dvorak keyboard.

[xenopeek]

I've tested calculator and text editor on Ubuntu 11.04. There the Contents works.

Also, the Help menu shows different content. On Linux Mint 11 it is just:
- Contents (F1)
- About

On Ubuntu 11.04 it is:
- Contents (F1)
- Get Help Online...
- Translate This Application...
- Report a Problem...
- About

So I checked the files. The help text is actually installed. For example for text editor, it is in:

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/usr/share/gnome/help/gedit/C/gedit.xml

The file is identical in size. So the help text is there, but it is not being displayed.

Investigating the /usr/share/gnome/help/gedit/ folder on both gives an identical count of files, links and directories:

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$ for t in files links directories; do echo `find . -type ${t:0:1} | wc -l` $t; done 2> /dev/null
8 files
184 links
49 directories

Perhaps indeed this is an issue in Yelp. Don't know. As last resort I checked how many files are installed by the package:

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dpkg -S gedit | wc -l

This differs. On Linux Mint it is 462, on Ubuntu it is 526. Which is strange, because both have the same version of the packages installed:
- gedit - 2.30.4-2ubuntu1
- gedit-common - 2.30.4-2ubuntu1

[xenopeek]

Surprisingly, I tested calculator and text editor also on Linux Mint Debian Edition (201012), and there Contents works normal in the Help menu on both.

So:
- Ubuntu 11.04 and Linux Mint 11 have the exact same packages installed for calculator and gedit, but only on Linux Mint does the help text not work
- It works on LMDE however

This does seem to point at something else than the applications themselves.

BTW if you just run "yelp" on Linux Mint 11, you are able to browse all the help files without problems! Getting confused here

[VeryNewToMint]

Thanks for looking into this, Vincent. I followed the thread I posted previously (https://bugs.launchpad.net/yelp/+bug/695260), and at the bottom it directs you to
https://bugs.launchpad.net/ubuntu/+sour ... bug/673362
This seems to be the same bug we have? At the bottom of this thread the conclusion is that the bug was fixed in "yelp - 2.30.2-0ubuntu2". Software Manager reports that the LM11 Yelp version is "Version: 2.30.1-0ubuntu1-1mint1". I have tried to find "yelp - 2.30.2-0ubuntu2", but I've had no luck. The closest thing I've found is this:
http://sources.gentoo.org/cgi-bin/viewv ... u&view=log
but I don't know what to do with it. Should I try to install this? How would I go about it please?

It is easy to find Yelp 3.04, but it seems this is only for Gnome 3? I get the following error when running ./configure on Yelp 3.04:
...
checking for GLIB - version >= 2.0.0... no
*** Could not run GLIB test program, checking why...
*** The test program failed to compile or link. See the file config.log for the
*** exact error that occured. This usually means GLIB is incorrectly installed.
checking for pkg-config... (cached) /usr/bin/pkg-config
checking pkg-config is at least version 0.16... yes
configure: error: glib-compile-schemas not found.

[xenopeek]

I tried what was in the bug report. Open a terminal, and do the following:

Code: Select all

gksudo gedit /usr/share/applications/yelp.desktop

Add the following line at the end of the file:

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MimeType=x-scheme-handler/ghelp;

Save & close the file. Then do:

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sudo update-desktop-database -q
sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

If I then launch calculator I can get Contents under help, but it doesn't show the application specific help--it shows the same entry page as you get when you launch yelp from command line.

[xenopeek]

I found the Ubuntu sources that have the fix according to the bug report: https://launchpad.net/ubuntu/+source/yelp/2.30.2-0ubuntu2

Checking the sources, the yelp.desktop file is identical so the Mime type is indeed not the fix. Compared it with 2.30.1-0ubuntu1-1mint1 sources from Linux Mint repository (http://packages.linuxmint.com/pool/upstream/y/yelp/). The diff file is almost 23,000 lines long (also compared to Ubuntu 2.30.1-0ubuntu1 package with same result).

I don't know that I'll fix it from 23,000 lines diff

[VeryNewToMint]

I tried to install
yelp_2.30.2.orig.tar.gz 1.7 MiB c9f785459cc53ea773d637d3b1d494eb
but I got this error:
...
checking for intltool >= 0.35.0... ./configure: line 4231: intltool-update: command not found
found
configure: error: Your intltool is too old. You need intltool 0.35.0 or later.

I then installed intltool 0.41.1-1, and the Yelp installation progressed farther along, yielding these errors:
...
checking for YELP... configure: error: Package requirements (
gio-2.0
gconf-2.0
gnome-doc-utils >= 0.19.1
gtk+-unix-print-2.0
gtk+-2.0 >= 2.18.0
libxml-2.0 >= 2.6.5
libxslt >= 1.1.4
libexslt >= 0.8.1
libstartup-notification-1.0 >= 0.8
dbus-glib-1
rarian >= 0.7.0
) were not met:

No package 'gio-2.0' found
No package 'gconf-2.0' found
No package 'gtk+-unix-print-2.0' found
No package 'gtk+-2.0' found
No package 'libxml-2.0' found
No package 'libxslt' found
No package 'libexslt' found
No package 'libstartup-notification-1.0' found
No package 'dbus-glib-1' found
No package 'rarian' found

Consider adjusting the PKG_CONFIG_PATH environment variable if you
installed software in a non-standard prefix.

Alternatively, you may set the environment variables YELP_CFLAGS
and YELP_LIBS to avoid the need to call pkg-config.
See the pkg-config man page for more details.

This looks like a can of worms, so I'll stop here! I guess I'll just run Yelp from the terminal. Thanks for trying!

[xenopeek]

Solved!!!

To solve the problem with Help -> Contents menu not working in any of the GNOME applications, do the following steps on Linux Mint 11.

1. Download the attached yelp.desktop-20110904.patch.gz file, that I created for this.

yelp.desktop-20110904.patch.gz

(434 Bytes) Downloaded 220 times

2. Open the downloaded file from your file browser, and extract the yelp.desktop-20110904.patch file to your Desktop folder.
3. Open a terminal, and run the command to patch your yelp.desktop file:

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sudo patch /usr/share/applications/yelp.desktop ~/Desktop/yelp.desktop-20110904.patch

4. Activate the changes:

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sudo update-desktop-database -q
sudo update-mime-database /usr/share/mime

If you open a new GNOME application, the Help -> Contents menu will work again. You can also delete the yelp.desktop-20110904.patch file once this is done.

[conslie]

Excellent!!

I looked up this discussion just yesterday to see if any progress had been made. Thank you, Vincent, for sticking with it.

Help now works perfectly. Thank You!

[VeryNewToMint]

It works! Thanks Vincent!

[chris215]

vincent:

thank you so much for sticking with it and making this happen. i hope this patch will be posted on launchpad and/or wherever it needs to be, and included in the soonest possible software update. With your permission, and with all due credits put due, i would ask if i can post your tutorial and file in as many relevant forums and wikis as possible so that the next person who is looking to fix this problem isnt looking for 4 hours before he finds this page like i did. Again i thank you so much. Please get back if you get the chance, cmrodican@gmail.com

Thanks

[xenopeek]

vincent:

thank you so much for sticking with it and making this happen. i hope this patch will be posted on launchpad and/or wherever it needs to be, and included in the soonest possible software update. With your permission, and with all due credits put due, i would ask if i can post your tutorial and file in as many relevant forums and wikis as possible so that the next person who is looking to fix this problem isnt looking for 4 hours before he finds this page like i did. Again i thank you so much. Please get back if you get the chance, cmrodican@gmail.com

Thanks

Please note that this issue only affects Linux Mint 11 GNOME, and possibly other Ubuntu derivatives. It does not affect LMDE 201108 RC, Debian 6 or Ubuntu 11.04. Neither does it affect Fedora 15.

I have submitted a bug report for this: https://bugs.launchpad.net/linuxmint/+bug/844534

(Thanks for the reminder on that )

Go ahead and share this information if you know of other locations where Linux Mint 11 users may find this. I request you link to the bug report so people get the full up-to-date situation.

[xenopeek]

To get Tomboy Notes help working, and perhaps other mono applications, do the following steps.

1. Open a terminal, and run:

Code: Select all

gksudo gedit /etc/mono/config

2. Just before the final </configuration> line, insert the following line:

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   <dllmap dll="glib-2.0.dll" target="libglib-2.0.so.0" os="!windows"/>

3. Save & close the file. Tomboy Notes help menu now also works.