LMDE BREAKAGES - (Tracking SID!) -{CLOSED}

[cwwgateway]

@zerozero
Is Cinnamon any better in Debian Testing (and if yes, how much better)?

[zerozero]

cww,
if i understand the question you mean better in testing as in opposed to sid?
it doesn't really make a difference: the cinnamon packages you run in sid or in testing are the same, the features as well. it's like saying "is xfce better in testing or sid?"

with that said, might be differences for better or worst (depending on the graphic cards you have): knowing that cinnamon is 3D demanding if/when a certain driver is not available in a certain release (thinking specially about amd that has the "good habit" of break all the time) the user experience may vary a lot.

[cwwgateway]

Sorry, I wasn't very clear. I meant to ask if Cinnamon and Gnome Shell broke less in Testing (and if so, how much). I will have to consider graphics card drivers, though (which I mostly forgot about).

[GeneC]

Hey cww..

From my experience I have three discreet installations of LMDE/SID with five different Desktop Environments.... , the most stable are XFCE (I am at 4.10 from Experimental), and KDE. Never much trouble with either of those two desktops. Whenever there is (and there are more frequent ) updates to Shell, Cinnamon, or Mate...well... you can see some issues. With Shell, and Cinnamon you may have issues with applets/extensions for example, and the issue with Cinnamon that 'zerozero' pointed out (no problems with Cinnamon 1.6.4+lmde from ROMEO, for me).
Mate, I have used the least. I have a very stable, low resource XFCE running with virtually the same applets/look of old Gnome 2.3/Mate and its rock solid.

LMDE/XFCE 4.10-Compiz/SID



PS. Razor QT (thanks to 'zz' for that)..
viewtopic.php?f=197&t=114802
is working very well.

[cwwgateway]

Thank you Gene, I'll have to think about it this week and I'll probably reinstall over thanksgiving break (right now I'm thinking about Sid Xfce and Testing w/ apt-pinning Cinnamon). If I need anymore help I'll open a separate thread. I guess I won't be able to get a good gauge of cinnamon's stability in sid until after the release of wheezy, meaning testing will come out of the deep freeze.

[GregE]

Thank you Gene, I'll have to think about it this week and I'll probably reinstall over thanksgiving break (right now I'm thinking about Sid Xfce and Testing w/ apt-pinning Cinnamon). If I need anymore help I'll open a separate thread. I guess I won't be able to get a good gauge of cinnamon's stability in sid until after the release of wheezy, meaning testing will come out of the deep freeze.

IMHO -

Just to add to your thinking. Testing will become more and more stable as we approach the next Debian stable release. For the next year it will be feature locked as bugs are eliminated. So, Gome 3.4 on testing will be the next Debian and it will have nearly all the resources of Debian applied to it. Consequently Sid and Experimental will have less resources applied. This happens every other year in the cycle that is Debian Stable.

From the Debian Wheezy wiki we have the following as the versions targeted.

apt: 0.9.7
kernel: Linux 3.2
gcc: 4.7.1
Gnome 3.4, KDE 4.8, Xfce 4.8
libc: eglibc 2.13
X Server: Xorg R7.7

So if you really want Xfce 4.10 then Sid is your best option for the foreseeable future, or backporting the Sid packages onto Wheezy.

We all like challenge of running Sid or we would not be lurking in this forum, but if you want rock solid stability then Wheezy beats Sid hands down. To run Sid you have to accept a much higher maintenance effort and much more vigilant update monitoring. And that means a lot more time devoted to just keeping your computer running smoothly as distinct from actually using the computer for something.

Of course you could just run LMDE and stick with the standard update packs and ignore Sid, and have a less frustrating existence.

It all depends on what you want to do with your computer and how keen you are to push boundaries. Sid is a wonderful teaching tool. Every time it breaks you have to fix it and your Debian knowledge expands.

[GeneC]

Applies to LMDE/SID with KDE desktop.

I saw this yesterday.

Problems with running programs as root in GUI [gparted, synaptic, bleachbit(as root), et]
They would not open.

Report of same issue on Siduction Forums.
http://siduction.org/index.php?name=PNp ... 5bfb4000dd

PROBLEM

Greetings, I am not sure if this should be here or in bug fixes, but since I first noticed it after a dist-upgrade last night, I thought it may belong here.

I was unable to run partition manager as root. when I tried to run it this came up in a window.

Warning: You do not have administrative privileges.
It is possible to run KDE Partition Manager without these privileges. You will, however, not be allowed to apply operations.
Do you want to continue running KDE Partition Manager?

and it gave the option of running as a regular user or quitting. I tried running other GUI programs that required root access including gparted, synaptic, and krusader. None of which would run from the pull down menu or by terminal command. they would all ask for the root password, and then fail.

I have also tried adding my user name to the sudo group but using sudo does not seem to work any better.

RESPONSES
1.

1.Start these programs in a terminal as user

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 su-to-root -X -c gparted

2.

You can also open KDE Menu Editor (we will use partitionmanager (KDE Partition Manager) for example)

Under General -> Command

The default setting is partitionmanager

Change that to kdesu partitionmanager

Then, top left corner and hit save,your system will update and your good to go

You can do that with any app

I don't think there are many of us running LMDE/SID/KDE.....

---------------------------

In my case the GTK themes also broke for those applications.

[zerozero]

Gene,
what were the updates in this meantime?

[GeneC]

Hi 'zz'...

Let me boot back to KDE (Playing with Shell install right now...)

EDIT: OOPS! Just remembered, I decided to revert to a recent clone, and change sources to Testing. I'll change back to SID and see what wants to upgrade. Should be only one days worth. Back in a minute...

[GeneC]

This is what will DU

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Reading state information... Done
Calculating upgrade... Done
The following packages will be upgraded:
  coreutils dmsetup libc-bin libc-dev-bin libc6 libc6-dev libdevmapper-event1.02.1 libdevmapper1.02.1 libdvdcss2 libgssapi-krb5-2 libk5crypto3 libkpathsea6 libkrb5-3
  libkrb5support0 liblvm2app2.2 liblzma5 libpci3 libqtwebkit-dev libqtwebkit4 locales multiarch-support pciutils xz-utils
23 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.
Need to get 28.4 MB of archives.
After this operation, 1,107 kB of additional disk space will be used.
Do you want to continue [Y/n]?


===================

EDIT:

Using this fix

You can also open KDE Menu Editor (we will use partitionmanager (KDE Partition Manager) for example)

Under General -> Command

The default setting is partitionmanager

Change that to kdesu partitionmanager

Then, top left corner and hit save,your system will update and your good to go

You can do that with any app

Works fine for me, for all the problem applications. Fixed the broken themes, as well. Not sure why things changed, but this may be a help to others with this problem.

[mockturtl]

Not a sid problem, but the new google-chrome-unstable (25.0.1354.0-r171980) is really crashy, for me. Tabs croak immediately after a page loads.

[GregE]

Not a sid problem, but the new google-chrome-unstable (25.0.1354.0-r171980) is really crashy, for me. Tabs croak immediately after a page loads.

That is a problem with Google Sync at the Google end and should be fixed by now.

[mockturtl]

So ("Aw, Snap!") far it seems ("Aw, Snap!") to ("Aw, Snap!") persist. I figured Flash, but disabling the plugin doesn't help.

edit: Corrupted profile, I guess. After blowing away ~/.config/google-chrome/Default, I have 730 MB more free space and a working browser.

[zerozero]

just an oddity my debian sid thinks that is debian 7 wheezy
today's update of

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The following packages will be upgraded:
  base-files
1 upgraded, 0 newly installed, 0 to remove and 0 not upgraded.

gives me this now

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zerozero@debian:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:   Debian
Description:   Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 (wheezy)
Release:   7.0
Codename:   wheezy
zerozero@debian:~$ cat /etc/issue
Debian GNU/Linux 7.0 \n \l

zerozero@debian:~$ cat /etc/issue.net
Debian GNU/Linux 7.0



[GeneC]

'zz'........

I said NO to "replace the (whatever? conf file)" ..... ,,,,,

LMDE/XFCE/SID

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gene@zordon:~$ lsb_release -a
No LSB modules are available.
Distributor ID:   LinuxMint
Description:   LMDE Xfce Edition
Release:   1
Codename:   debian

[GregE]

Hi guys.

Do we see an apocalypse coming? They have dropped i386 from the new kernels and from gcc (I think). So, very soon i386 for Debian will have to become i686. Those of us with Multi-arch will have fun removing an arch and adding a new one and reinstalling all the 32 bit stuff.

Then there is the dependency hell.

It will be an interesting thing to watch how this is handled. I would guess they will have to build a whole new i686 branch and start afresh.

Interesting times ahead. Good time to have already moved to AMD64.

[cwwgateway]

Hi guys.

Do we see an apocalypse coming? They have dropped i386 from the new kernels and from gcc (I think). So, very soon i386 for Debian will have to become i686. Those of us with Multi-arch will have fun removing an arch and adding a new one and reinstalling all the 32 bit stuff.

Then there is the dependency hell.

It will be an interesting thing to watch how this is handled. I would guess they will have to build a whole new i686 branch and start afresh.

Interesting times ahead. Good time to have already moved to AMD64.

AFAIK they still support i486, i586, and i686. It will be interesting, however. My guess is that they'll figure it out - Debian has many, many devs that use 64-bit/multiarch systems. Maybe they could do a symlink like thing (link i386 repos to the i486/i586/i686 repos).

I have a lot of confidence in Debian - they have 1000s of people contributing, and one of those people must be able to create a fairly easy way. They'll probably document it well, too.

Regardless, I don't think that 3.8 will show up in official Debian repos for a while - they appear to have committed to 3.2 until after wheezy is released, then there will be 3.3/.4/.5/.6/.7 before this is an issue. I'd be interested to see how repos that provide the latest/later kernels for Debian handle this. Liquorix, Siduction, and Aptosid (and anyone else) may have to stay on 3.7 for a while (aptosid is already on 3.7, but the other two are on 3.6) unless they can come up with a clever way to make it work.

[GregE]

I have a lot of confidence in Debian - they have 1000s of people contributing, and one of those people must be able to create a fairly easy way. They'll probably document it well, too.

Yeah, it will not be an issue for Wheezy and it will be ancient history by the time Jessie is released.

Just something for us who use Sid and Experimental to watch unfold in a few months time.

[GeneC]

Hi guys.

Do we see an apocalypse coming? ..................... )

Not unless your Mayan (12-21-12)... .

...........Interesting times ahead. Good time to have already moved to AMD64.

Yep!.. SID has been a real bore these last six months or so, almost no problems.....

[GregE]

Yep!.. SID has been a real bore these last six months or so, almost no problems.....

Hi Gene,

I think i see the issue with the Mayans. They were clearly using a 32bit calendar.

My 64bit Sid is also so stable it is boring. The Wheezy freeze helps with that by slowing everything down.